


Maybe Redemption is Stories to Tell

by DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee



Series: Son of a Spider [9]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Runaways (Comics), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Young Avengers
Genre: Adoption, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Feels, Angst and Humor, Avengers Family, Bruce Banner & Tony Stark Friendship, Clint Barton & Matt Murdock Friendship, Domestic Avengers, F/M, Families of Choice, Family Feels, Fluff and Angst, Foggy Nelson Is a Good Bro, Found Family, Gen, Loki Has Issues, Matt Murdock & Foggy Nelson Friendship, Parent Natasha Romanov, Phil Coulson Has the Patience of a Saint, The Avengers Meet Matt, Tony Stark Does What He Wants, kate bishop is better than you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-17
Updated: 2016-06-17
Packaged: 2018-07-15 14:59:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7227124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee/pseuds/DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In wich Matt Murdock copes with Asgardians, little sisters, and nosy superheroes.</p>
<p>Also known as 'why you should never let Loki crash on your couch'   </p>
<p>Featuring an excess of Asgardians, more paper cranes, New York City, shenanigans, 80s movies, hot cocoa and feelings.  Not necessarily in that order.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Maybe Redemption is Stories to Tell

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so this fic is a solid 15,000 more words than it was supposed to be. Ugh. This is what happens when you let Loki hijack the narrative. 
> 
> This one's for all the people who've been asking about Matt meeting the Avengers :)   
> As always, a HUGE thank-you to everyone who's read, reviewed, kudos-ed and bookmarked this series. Your support means the world to me. 
> 
> Also, side note: some comics-only characters from an obscure but very excellent comic called 'Runaways' that did some cool cross-over events with Young Avengers (before 'Runaways' was cancelled) get some cameo mentions, as do some familiar faces from the Young Avengers comics. All of these character's backstories have been heavily altered to fit into MCU so don't be surprised if you see something unfamiliar. Again, they're only cameos and don't appear for long, but I thought I'd throw in a heads-up here.

**Maybe Redemption is Stories to Tell**

            “Matt,” Foggy’s voice on the end of the line sounded strained, like he was trying very, very hard, to keep calm.

            “Yeah?” Matt said into his earpiece (inset into his helmet, his last birthday gift from Phil – courtesy of SHIELD’s tech squad) as he casually clobbered the last of three muggers, leaning over to check to make sure the men were down for the count but not permanently damaged.

            “Loki is in our living room.”

            “What?”

            “I said _Loki is in our living room_. Alien god? Prince of Asgard? Oh, sorry, _former_ Prince of Asgard? He got this pissy look on his face when I said that… Whatever, a fugitive from justice _from another planet_ is giving me the angsty teen eyeroll _in my living room_. So. _Your_ role as resident vigilante-bff-roommate is to get your ass back here and call the Avengers. Because I am not equipped to deal with this shit at 2am on a Sunday.”

            A moment of dead air as Matt allowed his brain a moment to recover/reboot from that diatribe. Brain successfully back up and running, he blinked, shook his head (which made his world-on-fire twirl and sway in strange ways), and refocused. “Yeah, okay, I’ll be there in five.”

…

            It had been three months since the ‘New York Incident’ - as the government types were calling it, and/or the Battle of New York as the news pundits were calling it, and/or ‘That [insert profanity of choice here] alien invasion [insert further profanity here]’ as New Yorkers were calling it. Phil Coulson was confirmed alive after a harrowing month for his mourners and a harrowing-for-unrelated-reasons month for everyone else on the planet; leaving the world, the Avengers, SHIELD, and various Avengers-affiliates two additional months to recover from ‘That Thing Y’Know, Where We Almost Died’.

            And after three months living in a hotel – a _hotel_ , like _Tesla_ (Tony’s inner child – who spent many an hour reading about The Greatest Scientist Ever, No Really He Tried to Make a Deathray and That’s Freaking Cool, was kind of squealing with glee) Stark Tower had finally been deemed livable – more than livable – completely repaired and improved. Tony’s inner adult was kind of squealing with glee at that one too.

            “Tony.”

            “Tony.”

            “ _Tony_.”

            “What, Pep?” he said absently, running his fingers lovingly through the holograms in his new-and-improved workshop.

            “I just said your name three times.”

            “It’s a good name, isn’t it? Just rolls off the tongue. Lovely.”

            “Tony.”         

            “See? You can’t stop saying it once you start.”

            “Focus.”

            “Aw, that’s not nearly as fun as my name. Let’s go back to saying that. Preferable somewhere more… _comfortable_ ,” he wiggled his eyebrows suggestively at her and she smacked him in the arm with a folder.

            “Tony. Focus. I know you want to invite all your superhero buddies to live here in your clubhouse – ”

            “Aw, come on, that makes us sound like we’re eight.”

            She raised a perfectly plucked ginger eyebrow meaningfully in his direction – as he continued to run his hands all over every new tool/object/hologram/project in his workshop like a kid who’s been told not to touch anything in a toy store. He huffed at her and waved at her to continue.

            “But you might want to be careful how you approach actually _asking_ them. Remember, these are people with lives and families – ”

            “Since when do they have families?” Tony said, propping up the mask of a new welding helmet he’d dropped on his head to try out the fit – or just look at the world tinted funny colors through the blast shield. “I figured we were all, you know…” he gestured vaguely with one hand, “emotionally stunted loners. You know, hero clichés.”

            Pepper sighed fondly, he hoped it was fondly, if the sigh wasn’t fond by this point, he had clearly been misreading some social cues in a bad way for the past year, “You said Clint and Natasha group-hugged someone at the shwarma place? Someone who said ‘mom’…?”

            Tony rolled his eyes, taking the welding mask off his face. “Okay, so I’ve been meaning to look into that guy for a while and I’ve got some theories.”

            Pepper put on her Patient Face. “Alright.”

            “Okay, theory one – he’s a SHIELD agent and ‘mom’ is some kind of code word. Theory two – he’s a SHIELD agent and he just got really bad news about his mom and Nata-whatever-her-real-name is and birdseye were comforting him – not likely from a pair of people who specialize in impalement and sharp objects, but a possibility. Theory three – they’re all secretly half-siblings and in some kind of wacky soap opera twist they all found out they have the same mother after all these years.”

            Pepper’s Patient Face was looking extra patient today.

“Theory four was some kind of kinky sex thing, which I hope was unlikely.”

            Pepper looked like she might want a drink to go with her Patient Face.

            “And Theory Five – SHIELD shenanigans. I don’t know what those are, but I’m sure they’re complicated like a Facebook relationship status.”

            Pepper sighed again. Hopefully fondly.

            “And Theory Six – He’s an android created by some shadowy agency who escaped the lab in the chaos and was wandering New York confused out of his little techno-noggin.”

            A moment of silence as Pepper considered his wise words.

            “Tony,” and now the Patient Face has been joined by a Patient Tone, “Why didn’t you just run facial recognition on him? Also, half of those theories sound like the plots of telenovelas and bad sci-fi movies.”

            Tony waved his hands abstractly, “I tried to run a facial, but the exterior cameras on the suit were busted up pretty bad after, you know, _plummeting out of space_ , and I couldn’t get a full or partial facial photo. Definitely not enough to run through recognition software. And of course half the theories are ridiculous, I fight evil and invading aliens in a flying suit of armor – everything is way past the ridiculous point now.”

            Pepper arched another extremely articulate eyebrow.

            “And I watched a lot of bad tv while at the hotel.”

            “You could have gone back to the California house.”

            Tony pressed a hand to his chest like a scandalized southern belle, “And not supervise the creation of the _Avengers Tower_? _Pepper,_ what kind of person do you take me for?”

            “You mean micro-manage the guys building your new lab.”

            Tony shrugged, “And everyone else. I had a lot of time on my hands. I micro-managed a lot of things.”

            Pepper shook her head, her patented I-don’t-know-how-this-conversation-got-so-off-track-but-I’m-sure-it’s-Tony’s-fault look clear on her face, “Tony, back to the point at hand. You don’t know who that guy is. He was obviously very important to Clint and Natasha. And that’s just an example. Your fellow Avengers probably have lives and families outside of Avenging. Just be aware of that when you invite them to your super-secret clubhouse.”

            “Now, Pep, when have I ever had a super-secret _anything_?”

            She rolled her eyes, one point to Tony Stark, he got the unflappable Ms. Potts to _roll her eyes_ , “Not the point, Tony. Do you want me to draft the email invites for you?” The ‘so you don’t say something wildly inappropriate/insensitive’ part was gently implied.

            “Sure,” Tony shrugged with a grin on his face, “This was all your idea in the first place,” he reminded her.

            She sighed, “JARVIS and I thought you might benefit from the company of other superheroes. _You_ are the one who built them all floors.”

            “ _Great_ floors.”

            “Yes, Tony, great floors.”

            “Speaking of JARVIS palling around with superheros, did you hear, Pep? JARVIS made a _friend_. Yeah, apparently he and Daredevil – the wacko in the red and black Halloween costume ninja-ing around the Big Apple – are buddies now.”

            “Tony, no one who lives here calls it ‘the Big Apple’.”

            “Psh, I’m a trend-setter. Anyway, Daredevil is now friends with _my_ robot butler. That _I_ made, making me basically his father. JARVIS, that is. So, I have to track this Daredevil down and determine if he’s suitable friend-material for my _lying AI who lies_ ,” he pitched the last at the ceiling, making sure JARVIS caught every word.

            “Sir, need I remind you that I never lied to you about anything. I merely neglected to mention my association with Daredevil until you specifically asked what I have been up to in your absence.”

            Tony rolled his eyes, “Lies. Lies. Sneaking an lies.”

            Pepper gave him another Patient Look, “Done?”

            Tony shrugged, “For now.”

            “So, what exactly is today’s to-do list, Mr. Stark?” she asked, a little quirk at the corner of her mouth letting him in on the joke.

            “No idea. I don’t plan for days, I plan for when-evers.”

            “Of course.”

            “Yep. But the general idea is 1.) convince the Avengers to hang out with me in the super-awesome tower clubhouse I built, 2.) figure out which theory about the dude at the shwarma place is true, and 3.) figure out what Daredevil’s deal is.”

            Pepper arched a good-humored eyebrow, “Will that be all, Mr. Stark?”

            “Nope,” he popped the ‘p’ on the end of the word, “You and I are drinking a toast to our new tower – but not champagne, that turned out horribly last time. Maybe if I’m feeling generous I’ll invite Agent Agent over and he can toast not being dead,” Tony’s bright smile got a little wobbly at the end of the sentence, it still ached deep in his chest when he thought about Phil’s not-death. Even though the guy turned up alive in the end – definitely the worse for wear and fiercely guarded by the spy kids (My-Name-is-Not-Natalie and birdbrain were apparently very attached to their handler), it still twinged when he thought about it.

            “Sounds like a plan, Mr. Stark,” Pepper said gently, and hey, there she was in his space, taking his hands in hers and leading him upstairs to celebrate their new home.

…

            “Get the fuck out of my apartment,” Matt snarled, diving feet-first through the living room window from the fire escape and launching his combat-booted feet straight into the heartbeat he could hear drumming through the Asgardian’s back. They went down in a tangle of limbs and curses. Loki was stronger than him – significantly stronger, but not as fast or as skilled at combat. Matt, knowing this wasn’t an enemy he could just bludgeon into submission, went for pressure points and nerve clusters, hitting several in rapid succession until their resident invader was a puddle on the floor.

            “What sorcery is this?” Loki snarled, uselessly flopping one of the arms Matt had temporarily numbed.

            “It means all humanoids tend to have almost the same nerve centers,” Matt said, mildly surprised, “That’s good to know.”

            “So do we call the Avengers now?” Foggy asked from the corner where he’d been standing holding…was that a baseball bat? Seriously? He was going to clobber a space-god with a wooden bat? And Foggy said _Matt_ was reckless.

            “Depends,” Matt said coldly, idly kicking the crumpled princeling, “On why he’s here. And if I want to kick his ass a few more times before handing him over to Thor.”

            “As if you could,” Loki hissed. Which, considering he was spitting out bits of their carpet as he said it – was not particularly impressive.

            “So,” Matt elaborated, voice pitched to what Clint would call a ‘conversationally menacing’ tone, “ _Loki_ , care to tell us what the fuck you’re doing breaking into my apartment instead of rotting in an Asgardian prison cell?”

            Loki huffed a disgusted “Tch,” at the question and did not deign to answer.

            Matt planted a foot between the alien prince’s shoulder blades and pressed down, “Care to try that again?” he growled.

            “Seeing as you kidnapped and mind-controlled his stepfather and stabbed his uncle, I’m pretty sure this guy isn’t exactly making your comfort a priority,” Foggy informed Matt’s prisoner casually.

            Loki snarled; torso wriggling ineffectually as he tried to get away with all his limbs limp and numb.

            Matt let him struggle a bit before stomping down on his back again, pinning him once more. “Answer the question.”

            “This is demeaning,” Loki grumped.

            Foggy snorted, “Hey, you’re the one who broke into our apartment; don’t expect the five-star treatment.”

            Loki didn’t seem pleased by that analysis, but couldn’t seem to find a way to argue around it.

            “I’m asking this question one more time,” Matt informed him flatly, tone dead and cold, “And if you don’t answer, I’m calling in the Avengers and SHIELD and washing my proverbial hands of you right now. What are you doing here?”

            He could hear Loki’s tooth enamel squeal as the godling ground his molars together, “I wish to…understand,” each word was halting, as if they had to be fished out of his esophagus with a hook and fishing line, “How your… _family_ functions.”

            Of all the answers Loki could have possibly given, Matt would have to acknowledge that one was undoubtedly the single least-expected one.

            “What?” Matt said, tone teetering, uncertain of what resonance to strike.

            Loki made an irritated sound, “I do not enjoy repeating myself, mortal.”

            “Too bad,” Matt said, half on autopilot.

            “I wish to comprehend how your supposed ‘family’ functions. The archer seemed…fond of you. In his mind, you are his son, despite your not being of his blood.”

            “You broke into my house in the middle of the night and terrorized my roommate, because you have some _unresolved questions about my adoption_?” Matt didn’t let himself dwell on the ‘in his mind, you are his son’ comment. He knew Clint cared about him, knew they were family, but for some reason Matt had never really expected that kind of unconditional love from him, from anyone, really. Matt had always assumed he would love others more than they would love him. After all, his birth mother had left before he was a year old. Before Natasha came along, he assumed he had lost his one chance to have that kind of parental love with the death of Battlin’ Jack.

            But that was neither here nor there.

            Loki shifted under his boot, but not like he was trying to escape, more like he was…uncomfortable. Contrite was a bit too much to hope for. “I…apologize,” the word was stiff and awkward, like a child learning the syllables at the behest of a parent.

            “For what,” Matt growled.

            “For enthralling your guardian in order to seize control of the Tessaract and conquer your sad little planet.”

            Matt made a contemplative noise, then, uncertain if he was doing the right thing, removed his boot from Loki’s back. “What do you want from me?”

            “To observe you and your strange little tribe. Until I understand.”

            Matt sighed; Foggy produced a sound that couldn’t quite decide what it wanted to be.

            Loki decided to push his case, playing his trump card; “And if you don’t agree and call my so-called ‘brother’ and his _comrades,”_ Loki said ‘comrades’ like a five-year-old would say ‘cooties’, “I will tell every mortal I come in contact with before my departure of your double identity, Matthew ‘Daredevil’ Murdock.”

            Well, shit.

            “I keep telling you man, secret identities suck.”

            “Not helping, Foggy.”

…

            “Stark’s email comes with a _powerpoint presentation,_ Tasha.”

            “Mmhmm.”

            “There are footnotes to this thing.”

            “Footnotes to the powerpoint or footnotes to the email?”

            “Both? I think? There’s little pop-up things in each slide? Oh, hey, there’s a video tour!”

            “Really.”

            “Yeah, this is some intense shit.” Clint looked up from his laptop to give Natasha the crooked smile she’d spent the past three months slowly coaxing out of him. The crooked smile she remembered from when they’d first met, when they’d cooked monkfish and built Lego metropolises with preteen Matt trailing after them. When Clint would grab her hands and spin her into sloppy, un-choreographed dances through the living room. When he’d sing to her and grin at her like smiling at the Black Widow was the most natural thing in the world. When life was easy even when it seemed like it wasn’t.

            It had been hard, after Loki, after Phil, after New York. Clint had gone into detox and then he hadn’t gone to therapy like he was supposed to and then there was the funeral and then there was Phil and then and then and then.

            Sometimes Natasha woke in the middle of the night, heart racing, sure that when she rolled over, when she opened her eyes, the bed would be empty beside her. She was always wrong, though. And in those midnight hours, with dirty New York street light filtering in through the cracks in the blinds, she’d sit up in bed and watch the rise and fall of his chest, trace the contours of his face with one delicate fingertip, committing every angle and shade of him to memory all over again. And then she’d settle back down onto the mattress and curl into him, covering as much of him with as much of her as she could, as if she could protect him from all the darkness with the strength of her body alone.

            And sometimes Clint woke up in the middle of the night and it wasn’t like the other nightmares they both sometimes had – their lives before had been hard and bloody and you didn’t get out of that without taking a few hits and earning a few scars – these new nightmares didn’t let Clint wake up thrashing, fighting an invisible enemy. No, after these nightmares his eyes would click open and his whole body would go deathly still except for the fine, delicate shivers that wracked their way through his skin like symptoms of a fever. He wouldn’t move, wouldn’t reach for her or for anything, he’d just lie there, wracked with imaginary cold, until Natasha took each of his hands and slowly, carefully, pried them out of the fists they had turned into, separating out each finger and rubbing warmth and life back into each palm, pulling them forward and letting them rest against her chest, over her beating heart, letting its steady rhythm ground him until he came back to her. Then they’d curl around each other and shelter from threats both imaginary and real.

            But now he was grinning at her, lopsided and real and she felt a small smile curling at the edges of her lips in response.

            “A _powerpoint presentation,_ Tasha.”

            “You seem awfully hung up on this powerpoint presentation.”

            “I’m a sucker for good clip art and awkwardly phrased bullet points.”

            Natasha bumped Clint’s shoulder with hers, “What do you think of Stark’s proposal?”

            “Well I’m not taking him until they up the dowry to seven cows.”

            Natasha rewarded him for this display of humor (which had been thin on the ground in the aftermath of what happened in New York) with a small chuckle and “Personally I’m holding out for seven cows and three goats.”

            “And a partridge in a pear tree?”

            “But I already have a hawk in a spider’s web,” she said innocently, batting her eyelashes in an exaggeration of the moves she used to seduce unwary marks.

            Clint tipped his head back and let out a gratifying bark of laughter, “You’re the best.”

            “I know,” she smiled gently, and squeezed his hand in hers, “So, Stark’s offer.”

            “He built us a _clubhouse._ A real-life superhero _clubhouse_. He remodeled the shit out of the tower and now apparently we all have personalized floors and suites and things and an open invitation to crash there indefinitely,” his voice still held traces of disbelieving laughter, like he couldn’t quite comprehend that this was something that was happening.

            Natasha hummed, “So what do we do about it?”

            “I don’t know; you’re the one who actually knows Stark. What do you think?”

            Natasha pressed her lips together and thought. One of the best things about coming home to Clint was the simple fact that with him there was never an angle to be worked; she could give him her thoughts uncensored. “Everything I told Fury was true,” she finally said, “But that isn’t the whole story.”

            “It never is,” Clint agreed easily.

            She gave him a wry smile, “Exactly. Stark is self-centered, arrogant, and lacks impulse control.”

            “But?”

            “But, he is at heart a decent man. And while he may omit information, he rarely lies and while he tends to overdo and underdo things – there is no middle ground – he is essentially well-intentioned. Ironically, he is upfront about everything but who he really is.”

            “Yeah?”

            “Occasionally awkward, well-meaning and too smart for his own good.”

            “Harsh.”

            Natasha shrugged, “You asked for my insights.”

            “We’ll have to figure out what to do with the apartment,” Clint pointed out.

            “We’ll keep it. As a contingency. And Kate can live here when she’s home from school.”

            Clint snorted, “Without anyone around to keep her from haring off and getting into trouble?”

            “The presence or absence of authority figures has never stopped either of our children from that before,” Natasha pointed out dryly, “And Matt can check in with her when we’re not available.”

            “Big brother is watching?”

            “Something like that.”

…

            Okay, so this was not exactly what Tony was expecting to find in his kitchen the next morning:

            “If Coulson’s Moneypenny we should probably rethink our whole relationship.”

            “It was never canonically confirmed that Bond and Moneypenny had mutually romantic feelings towards each other. And who says either of us is Bond?”

            Clint (what the actual fuck was this guy doing in Tony’s kitchen, eating his cocoa puffs at…oh, look it was noon…huh) shrugged, “We don’t have to be Bond. But who are we then? Most of the femme fatales in the Bond movies are…well, fatal.”

            “I’m plenty fatal,” Natasha (seriously, what the fuck was going on) pointed out from where she sat atop the kitchen counter.

            “Well sure, but you’re not evil.”

            “Maybe, maybe not.”

            “Hey, the evil smile stopped working on me about a decade ago, put that scary face away.”

            Tony figured this was as good a time as any to interject. “What the hell are you guys doing here? And who said you could eat my cocoa puffs?”

            Clint took another bite of cereal and gestured to Natasha to commence the explaining.

            “We are directly responding to your email.”

            “I was very impressed by your powerpoint,” Clint added, before accidentally knocking his spoon out of the bowl. It hit the floor with a sad, soggy clatter. “Aw, spoon, no.”

            “People typically do that with another email,” Tony pointed out.

            “Yeah, but we couldn’t beat your powerpoint skills so we figured,” Clint, spoon retrieved, gestured expansively with it, cereal bowl perched in his other hand, chocolaty milk sloshing perilously close to the sides of the bowl, “Eh, why not? Hey, Tasha, does the three-second rule apply to silverware?”

            “No, Clint,” she said with the air of someone who has had to say this far too many times in too many different situations.

            Tony blinked a few more times, “So you just decided to show up here, eat my food and throw my flatware on the ground?”

            “Yes, yes, and just the spoons,” Clint said cheerily, wiping the aforementioned spoon off on his shirt and proceeding to eat with it, despite the look Natasha shot him.

            Tony…was too tired to find a way to object to this without sounding like a giant toddler. Last night/this morning’s inventing binge had taken a lot out of him. So instead of protesting what kind of amounted to the world’s weirdest home invasion, he just said, “Anyone want coffee?”

…

            Matt was about ready to beat Loki over the head with a dictionary.

            The god of mischief was just so damn _fidgety._ He was like a kindergartener in grocery store; restless, touchy, and unlikely to follow any orders Matt cared to give. He also seemed convinced that in order to fully comprehend Matt’s family life he needed to shadow him every second of every day on the off-chance that one of Matt’s relatives might show up and interact with him. Matt’s life had turned into a nature documentary and he was the freaking gazelle and Loki was the over-invested British commentator.  

            Currently they were arguing over whether or not Loki should go to work with Matt and Foggy.

            “No, Loki. _I_ am going to get dressed in real clothes and go to work, where I will stay for several hours before returning here to _not_ work. _You_ are not part of the work equation. Preferably, you would not be part of any me-related equation, but as that does not seem likely or possible, you’re going to restrict your interference in my life to this apartment. _Do you understand me_?”

            Loki sniffed condescendingly and chose not to reply.

            Matt felt a sudden surge of sympathy for kindergarten teachers everywhere.

            “ _Do you understand me_?” he repeated, over-emphasizing every work just to be sure he completely communicated their intended meaning.

            “Well it hardly suits my purpose to observe you in a work environment, does it?” Loki observed archly, stabbing at the bottom of the jar of – what was that smell – grape, it was grape, jelly with an impatient butter knife.

            “Hey, don’t eat the last of the grape jelly,” Foggy ordered sleepily just as Loki crowed triumphantly and presumably extracted the last of the jelly from its glass prison and plopped it on a haphazardly toasted piece of bread (he had struggled with the toaster, Matt had tried to help him and just made it worse).

            “Seriously? The last of the grape jelly,” Foggy sighed, “That’s cold, man.”

            Loki went rigid behind the breakfast bar, Matt could hear his joints as they protested the sudden tension, “Do not mock me,” he said, voice frigid and heavy with power.

            Foggy yawned, “I feel like it’s too early and I’m missing way too much information for this conversation to make sense.”

            That was definitely not the response their houseguest/intruder was expecting. He faltered, momentarily thrown. “What?”

            The rustle of a t-shirt as Foggy made some sort of vague gesture and yawned again, “No idea what I’m supposedly ‘mocking’ you for, but here’s a blanket apology.”

            A beat of dead air as Loki tried to parse that statement, “What.”

            “Now your turn,” Foggy offered generously. Matt bit down on the irrational urge to laugh or maybe scream (how the hell was this his life again?).

            “What.”

            “Your turn to apologize,” Foggy explained patiently, “I apologized for saying whatever it was I said, and now you apologize for eating the last of the grape jelly without asking.”

            “You humans have so many strange little rules and rituals,” Loki observed and Matt thought the alien had probably meant for the words to be a sneer but they came out a little softer and more delicate than he probably intended them to be.

            “Eh, I’m pretty sure Asgard’s got it’s own weird rules and rituals,” Foggy verbally shrugged, “Now, the grape jelly.”

            “I… _apologize_ for depriving you of this,” faint crunching as Loki took a bite out of the mangled toast, “Surprisingly delicious grape concoction.” He finished off the toast in a few quick bites. “Now, what is a grape and how do I invest in their continued production?” he asked, tone so deadly serious Matt lost the battle and collapsed into helpless giggles.

            Loki sniffed, “If this is how you conduct yourself over the morning meal I shudder to contemplate how you manage in a professional environment.”

…

            Thor and company were the next to bounce into Tony’s tower and life, armed with groundbreaking scientific research and enough poptarts to shingle a roof. The latter component triggered an unexpected chain of events with the spy kids – namely, Natasha started baking.

            Okay, so Tony knew that people were more than their jobs – admittedly, he wasn’t, especially since the advent of Iron Man, but he intellectually knew that Natasha couldn’t sped all her time kicking ass and pretending to be people’s personal assistants before jabbing them in the necks with syringes (no, he was _not_ over that yet, thank you). But for some reason he just couldn’t quite make the concept of Natasha having hobbies gel in his brain. In Tony’s mind, she was just perpetually stalking through the halls of SHIELD, being, y’know, deadly and awesome and…stuff.

            Okay, so Tony’s expectations of reality were always a bit shaky on the ‘real’ bit.

            Anyway, the exact _last_ thing he would have expected the morning after Team Thor (which was really more Team Jane… which was really more Team Darcy because let’s be real, that kid kept that group’s collective shit together)’s arrival was the sight of the _honest-to-god Black Widow_ pulling what looked like a pan of fruit tarts out of the oven while lecturing Thor on the various properties of Earth produce. Because apparently _the Black Widow_ casually baked her own version of poptarts instead of eating the crappy over-processed ones like the rest of them. Oh, and Hawkeye (who, Tony was rapidly learning, was actually a _giant child_ ) was sitting on the counter again, eating frosting or glaze or something out of a mixing bowl with his fingers.

            “Friend Tony!” Thor bellowed, spinning to face him, the stool under the godling squealing in protest, “The Lady Natasha has been educating me on the many flavors and variations of Earth fruit! While our Asgardian produce is of a similar nature it does not precisely equate.”

            “Uh-huh,” was really all Tony could manage this early, oh and, “Barton, get the hell off my counters, your thug-boots are gonna scuff the cabinets.”

            Barton just cackled, “Hey, you invited us here, no take-backsies.”

            Natasha finally noticed what her not-better half was up to and snatched the bowl away from him. “Hands out of the glaze.”

            Barton wriggled his eyebrows suggestively and she pinned him with a look, “Don’t,” she said, then, with a very serious expression, dug in the bowl of glaze and smeared a blob of it on his face.

            Thor laughed, well, thunderously at their antics and even grouchy Morning Tony had to crack a smile at their silliness.

            Something warm tugged at the center of his chest, just under the arc reactor. He grabbed another mug of coffee to distract himself from what felt suspiciously like fondness.

…

            About a week into Loki’s self-enforced stay at the Murdock-Nelson residence Matt picked up his cellphone at work and instantly regretted it.

            “Heeey, Matt.”

            “Kate, what’s going on?” he shot to his feet, already ready to bolt out the door and race to wherever his trouble-magnet little sister was.

            “Uh, so I may have shot Loki…in the chest…in your apartment.”

            “Shot him with _what_?”

            “An arrow.”

            Matt let his silence do the talking for him.

            “A sticky arrow, you know, that releases that goopy stuff on impact and swells up and traps people.”

            Matt winced; steam-cleaning the carpet was going to be a _bitch_. “And?” Because nothing was that simple with Kate, or with any of them, really.

            “And I may have roughed him up a bit, before shooting him.”

            “Why? Why didn’t you just contain him with the arrow in the first place?”

            “Um. I was kind of pissed about what he did to Clint…and Phil…and the planet…and I may have just grabbed the first arrow I touched in the heat of the moment.”

            Admittedly, a few days ago and Matt would have wholeheartedly agreed that Loki heartily deserved any random violent episodes coming to him. And yes, maybe he still did, but there is nothing quite like living side by side with someone that rubs away big concepts like reputations and ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and ‘hero’ and ‘despot’. Things like that are just too big for daily life; daily life turns on little annoyances like using all but the last sip of milk and not replacing the jug, putting the toilet paper roll on wrong-side up, mundane struggles and frustrations and shenanigans.

            Quite simply, it became impossible to truly loathe Loki once he became just a person – a very annoying person, but just a person.

            Kate did not have this hang-up.

            “Okay Kate, I’ll be there in fifteen,” Matt promised her and hung up, turning to Foggy in their little closet office with a bleak look on his face, “Think they’ll let me take an early lunch?”

            Foggy shook his head grimly, “No way, dude.”

            “Smoke break?”

            “You don’t smoke.”

            “Coffee break?”

            “That’s not really a thing unless you’re getting coffee for them.”

            “Um.”

            “Just sneak out, Matt; I’ll cover for you.”

            “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

            “Go, go, make sure your baby sister doesn’t murder the alien lunatic squatting in our living room.”

…

            Bruce announced his own arrival by not announcing it at all. He simply walked up to Tony in the lab and said, “So you’re researching Daredevil.”

            Tony didn’t even pause in his perusal of grainy security camera footage (helpfully gathered by JARVIS), “Is that judgment I hear in your tone?”

            “Why would there be judgment?” Bruce said mildly, “You’re just casually invading the privacy of an obviously very solitary and guarded individual. No judgment at all.”

            Tony shot his friend a miffed look, “ _That_ , my good sir, was judgment.”

            Bruce just raised both eyebrows in a gesture that spoke volumes and tapped his pen absently against the lab bench, “Maybe. Maybe it’s your subconscious telling you to reconsider.”

            “No, bad scientist,” Tony waved his hands at him in a shame-on-you gesture, “No psychology here. Go to your room and think about what you’ve done.”

            Bruce chuckled, “Seriously, Tony, don’t you think this might not be the right way to handle the Daredevil situation?”

            “What Daredevil situation?” Tony said, “There is no Daredevil situation. None at all. Nada. I’m just – curious.”

            “Suspicious.”

            “Dirty word.”

            “Paranoid.”

            Tony mock-gasped in shock, “Take that back.”

            Bruce chuckled again, “Just think about it, Tony. I wouldn’t dig into this one. I’ve got some sympathy for people who don’t want to be found.”

            Tony frowned at him, “You and your ethics.”

            “I know, so annoying,” Bruce returned dryly.

            “ _So_ ,” Tony said dramatically, with the air of a teen queen unveiling the latest gossip, “Since you don’t want to help me with the Daredevil question – piffle on you and your snooty ethics – wanna help me try to crack the shwarma kid case?”

            “The what,” Bruce said flatly.

            “Who the hell the dude in the suit from the shwarma place is! I have _theories_.”

            “Couldn’t you just ask Clint and Natasha? It seems less…astonishingly creepy,” Bruce said, reviewing the holographic whiteboard Tony had set up full of the theories he’d given Pepper – plus a few other ones he’d concocted since.

            “Scientific inquiry!”

            “ – has nothing to do with this.”

            “Okay, so I really wanna play Hardy Boys on this one.”

            “Fair enough. Fine, I’m in.”

            “Sweet, science bros for the win!”

            “Science bros is not a thing, Tony.”

…

            “How exactly are we planning on telling Matt we’re living in a superhero tower?” Clint asked. He and Natasha sat atop the giant A (left on it’s lonesome after the battle) outside the building.

            “Messenger pigeon,” Natasha deadpanned, tossing birdseed to the plain old city pigeons that swarmed any New York building tall enough to make a decent perch.

            “Don’t encourage the vermin,” Clint pulled a pained face, “And yes, we should totally send a message to our blind, vigilante son via flying sky-rat. That’s a fabulous idea.”

            “I can’t tell if you’re serious or not.”

            “To be fair, it’s sometimes hard to tell when you’re joking too.” He kissed the side of her head absently, an easy expression of the comfort and familiarity that he’d fought so hard for in the first months they knew each other. A comfort and familiarity he’d found himself re-learning in the aftermath of Loki, re-learning how to be a real person again. It felt like a victory every time he reached out to her now on his own, every time she reached back.

            A moment of silence between the two of them as they sat up there with nothing but the wind and the city-smog and the pigeons to disturb them.

            “Singing telegram,” Natasha suggested suddenly and with such deathly seriousness Clint couldn’t help but crack up.

…

            Matt was pretty sure this was not the kind of situation Columbia law expected him to mediate when they handed him his diploma.

            “Kate, put down the bow.”

            “No.”

            “Kate.”

            “No.”

            Well, clearly Matt’s conflict resolution skills were a bit nonexistent.

            Loki sneered in agreement from his foamy prison. He didn’t actually say anything, Matt was really just guessing at his facial expression, but the air in Loki’s general vicinity felt sneer-like.

            “Kate,” Matt sighed, took a moment to mentally regroup (and catch his breath, he may have run here from the subway station – his lungs were protesting the abuse), and continued, “Loki may be a home invader, but shooting him isn’t going to make the problem go away.” There, that sounded nice and reasonable and completely insane.

            “Um, Matty, ‘home invader’ _literally means_ I could shoot him and law enforcement would be like ‘okay, no problem bro’.”

            “That law actually applies to guns.”

            “ _Matt_ ,” Kate growled irritably, “This asshole hurt Clint, fake-killed Phil and _invaded the planet_. And now you want me to _not shoot him_?!”

            “Well, when you put it like that it sounds ridiculous.”

            “You’re not particularly proficient at fulfilling your role as elder brother, are you?” Loki observed archly.

            “Hey,” Matt protested, “I’m trying to get her to _not shoot you_. Some gratitude would not go amiss.”

            “Perhaps you are not the best choice of subjects for study,” Loki mused.

            “He’s _studying_ you? Gross.”

            “Kate, that is not a euphemism,” Matt paused and tried very hard not to think, “And I would rather not know what you thought or implied it might be a euphemism _for._ ”

            “Okay, for the record, you’re the one who took that to a weird place, not me,” Kate pointed out.

            Matt resisted the urge to hit himself in the face repeatedly with a brick. Potential cranium damage, maybe. But at least the brick wouldn’t talk to him.

          “Okay, let’s get this back on track,” he tried to verbally corral the conversation into a shape that made sense, “Loki is here to observe our family to better comprehend the concept of adoption. Yes, he has done terrible things. No, I have not forgiven him. Yes, I beat him up when he first showed up here. No, that did not deter him from his ‘quest’. Yes, I am going to make you pay to steam-clean my carpets since you got this weird restraint foam-goo-shit all over the place. Any further questions?”

            “Nope,” Kate popped the ‘p’, “Just a statement.”

            “Proceed,” Matt felt like he was in the courtroom.

            “I get the couch; asshole from space sleeps on the floor.”

            Matt sighed in relief, running a weary hand over his face. Hand back at his side he turned in Kate’s general direction and for the first time since he got the phone call at work, gave her the smile he’d been holding onto for the next time he saw her. “Welcome home, Katie-Kate.”

            She grinned and practically bounced over to drag him into a hug, “Good to be home.”

            “Interesting,” Loki observed from where he was still pinned.

…

            Tony knew Steve ‘Captain Fucking America’ Rogers was going to be the hard sell on the whole ‘frat house super tower’ setup. Also, the man didn’t have an email because he was literally an antique. So Tony…just decided to wait until the guy showed up in New York again and _then_ he’d spring the Big Avengers Clubhouse surprise on him. Yeah. Foolproof plan. It wasn’t like they verbally attacked each other and said incredibly vicious un-take-back-able things to each other like petty reality tv contestants back on the helicarrier. Admittedly, they did apologize prettily and earnestly (Steve) and awkwardly and inappropriately (Tony) when they gathered to see Thor escort Loki off-planet, but that was more of a ‘let’s have a nice send-off’ moment than a ‘let’s be best-est buddies for ever-est’ moment.

            Still, it wouldn’t be the Avengers without Captain America.

            Plus Tony couldn’t help feeling a little twist in his chest at the thought of Steve all alone in a sad little SHIELD-issue shoebox apartment deep in a city he didn’t know anymore. Tony may not always see eye-to-eye with the guy (no height jokes, please and thank you), but even he wasn’t completely heartless. Or immune to the Captain America fanboy disease that struck every kid who grew up in the right time bracket to see the Cap cartoon growing up.

            So no, he wasn’t really planning on letting the team’s Capsicle waste away in some forgotten corner of Brooklyn.

            Hence why he had JARVIS running facial recognition software on traffic cameras 24/7, waiting until they pinged on Steve Rogers – or at least an equally stunningly symmetrical face. (Hey, it was a win-win situation in Tony’s book.)

            Tony wasn’t really expecting to be interrupted in the midst of an inventing binge a few days after Bruce’s return (yay! Another science buddy! Bruce, Tony, and Jane were going to _rule the world_ …or blow up the tower, either way) by JARVIS’ dulcet tones informing him that “A man matching Captain Rogers’ facial profile has been spotted being assisted by Daredevil in the area colloquially referred to as ‘Hell’s Kitchen’.”

            Wait, what?

            Okay, time to suit up; clearly Christmas had come early. Half the tasks on Tony’s to-do list were about to be checked off.

…

            “Thank you, but I didn’t actually need the help,” Steve said half-apologetically as he gathered the weapons dropped by the two muggers who, incidentally, had they themselves been dropped by the man in a devil’s costume made out of what might be Kevlar currently standing on a fire escape above Steve’s head, observing the proceedings with genuine exasperation.

            “You were attempting to _talk down_ a pair of armed thugs,” the Devil observed caustically. Steve wondered if this guy went around in a mask saving people why he hadn’t been considered for the Avengers. He figured in for a penny, in for a pound and asked as much.

            The man in red snorted, “Fury doesn’t like my attitude.”

            Well. Okay then.

            “Anyway,” Steve continued, “I really didn’t need the assist, although I’m grateful, really. Just, I’m, well…”

            “Captain America.” Wow, he’d recognized him and still managed to sound completely unimpressed. That was admittedly mildly awesome. Steve was more than a little sick of being a celebrity.

            “Exactly,” Steve said, only a little awkwardly, “And if I can take on Nazis and the Hulk and an alien invasion I’m pretty sure I can handle some kids with guns.”

            “You’re not immune to being shot. It would be a shame if we lost a national landmark so soon after getting it back,” the man in red pointed out dryly.

            “Hey, I’m just a guy,” Steve started to defend his personhood and caught himself up short, suddenly realizing just what verbal trap he’d fallen into. Shit.

            “Precisely. Just a guy in street clothes who didn’t realize that that kid was going to _shoot him dead_ if I hadn’t interfered.”

            Steve sighed and held out the guns, “The guns you’re so focused on. In case you wanted to turn them in to the proper authorities.”

            The Devil tipped his head to the side like a perplexed dog, “Do I look like the kind of man who deals much with ‘the proper authorities’?”

            “Do I look like a man that enthusiastic about the US flag?”

            “You don’t look like much of anything to me,” the other man said with an indecipherable twist of wry humor.

           “See, I was going to make a point about appearances not meaning anything, but now you’ve ruined it by being a brat.” The words could have been caustic, but instead Steve found a hint of wry humor sneaking into his tone. God help him, he kind of liked the strange kid in the Devil costume.

            “Captain America called me a brat, I’ll have to tell my mother the next time I speak to her.”

            “I’m sure that’s what every mother wants to hear.”

            “Well, she’s Russian, so she’ll be proud of me.”

            Steve chuckled at that. “So, do you want the guns or not?”

            “No.”

            Well, that killed the good cheer, didn’t it?

            Steve was saved from having to attempt to return the conversation to its previous levity by the whine of repulsors and the electronically-warped voice of Iron Man cutting through the tension.

            “Hello boys, did you color-coordinate on purpose or do you both just like red that much?”

            Daredevil tensed, about ready to bolt.

            “Hello, Tony,” Steve said, fighting hard to keep his voice light and conversational. He didn’t want to resume hostilities with Tony Stark. It had felt like they’d made real progress in the wake of their Tessaract-induced catfight, but the peace was still fragile. And Tony was still abrasive and annoying. But Steve would be damned if _he_ was the one to start a fight this time.

            “Hiya Stevie Wonder,” Iron Man’s tinny voice said, tone suggesting this was yet another pop culture reference that went sailing straight over Steve’s head, “Heard you were back in town, thought I’d stop by, say hi, then JARVIS tells me you’re chilling with Little Red Riding Hood here, and figured I’d just drop in, see what’s up.”

            “Nothing is ‘up’, Tony,” Steve said patiently.

            “Except for me, I’m up on this fire escape,” Daredevil said blandly.

            Steve nodded in acknowledgement. “True.”

            “Hey,” Tony’s attention had clicked over to the younger man with the focus of a heat-seeking missile or a shark, “So who the hell are you, exactly? What’s the end goal here? Do you just like running around New York City in your pajamas that much?”

            “People called me Daredevil,” the man in question answered blandly, with a smirk that said ‘and just try to get more information out of me’.

            “Great, super,” Tony said, only mildly sarcastic, “Now, this is admittedly, mostly for you, Mr. America, but feel free to come hang out, Double D. So I rebuilt the tower and now the top floors are Avengers living quarters. Steve, you managed to lose the room-getting musical chairs, so you’re stuck with the crappy floor, but I’m feeling generous so despite your tardiness, you’re still invited.”

            “I’m going to take that as my cue to leave,” the man in the devil costume said, and despite Tony’s indignant splutterings (mostly to the tune of ‘get back here, kid, I still have questions!’), scaled the side of a building, flipped onto the roof and took off.

            Dead silence reigned on the sidewalk.

            “So? Avengers Tower?” Iron Man said, admirably, only a little awkwardly, “I can give you the grand tour, show you all the ways we’re cooler than whatever bunker SHIELD has you stashed in.”

            Steve, who had not really expected his night to get quite this strange this quickly, just sighed, shook his head and said, “Sure, Tony.”

            “Yay,” Tony said quietly and only a little sarcastically, “Come along, oh captain, my captain, to the tower!”

            Steve couldn’t help it – he laughed.

…

            “YOU MET CAPTAIN AMERICA!”

            “Foggy, it really wasn’t that exciting.”

            “Bullshit, you _met Captain America_.”

            “Kate, don’t back him up.”

            “I agree with Matthew, it really isn’t that impressive.”

            “Oh shut up, Loki.”

…

            Clint and Natasha were going to do this right. They were going to take their children out to a nice dinner somewhere low profile with trustworthy wait-staff, good sightlines, and excellent acoustics and explain the whole Avenger’s Tower thing. It was all planned out. Phil had even recommended a restaurant – and a few other second choices in case his first recommendation was destroyed in the Battle of New York.

            So yes, a nice dinner, a nice, adult conversation with their children about everyone’s lives and plans and part-time superheroics – perfect, right?

            That was not what ultimately happened.

            Natasha had called Matt earlier that day to make plans and to check in with Kate, who was recently returned from university. So naturally, the Avengers were called in to deal with some sort of alien-tech-mad-science-has-unintended-consequences shit fifteen minutes before Natasha and Clint were planning on leaving to meet the kids.

           “Uh, hey guys,” Clint found himself yelling in his phone’s general direction as he suited up (falling over at least once because why be a graceful, catlike super-person when he could be a human disaster, right?), “We’re gonna have to cancel dinner tonight. Some dumbass sold some alien tech on Ebay and some _other_ dumbass in like, Iowa – ”

            “Ohio!” Natasha interjected from where she was strapping on weapons without face-planting once, the elegant creature.

            “Okay, _Ohio_ – fuck, I hate the Midwest, there’s way too much space out there. Cornfields, everywhere. Nowhere to snipe, plenty of room to rampage. Fuck the Midwest, seriously, I can say that because I’m from there.”

            “Still rude,” Natasha reminded him blandly, “And off-topic.”

            “Hey, you go on angry rants about Russia.” Admittedly, Natasha’s ‘angry rants’ tended to be more cool, analytical lists of why she hated something than anything else, but whatever. This phone call was turning into a trainwreck. He hoped Matt checked his messages.

            “Anyway, we’ve got to go be superheroes, I guess?” Frankly, this whole ‘superhero’ thing kept catching Clint by surprise whenever he thought about it and there were definitely some days he woke up and was 97.2% sure it was all some kind of wacky dream brought on by one too many blows to the head. “We love you guys, stay safe. Oh, by the way, if you guys want to use the apartment, feel free. We’re kind of staying at the tower with the team for now. See you when we get back…” Clint paused, suddenly hesitant to hang up, to sever this slender thread connecting him to his children. The urge to say something else, to say something more, swelled in his chest, an inexplicable pressure against his sternum. He had no idea what else there was to say, he just wanted there to be more, he supposed. Words for the overwhelming, crushing gratitude that he could be with them, in their lives. That they still wanted him there, despite everything that had happened to, with, and because of him. His eyes stung and he shook his head, willing the tears away, sure that there was no point, no reason for them, just a strange, unnamable feeling coiling in his chest like a thread of smoke from a bonfire.

            Natasha reached past him, pressing ‘end call’, and putting the phone into sleep mode in one smooth gesture. She looked up at him through her hair, red threads shining bright in the light. “Let’s go,” she said, green-grey eyes unfathomable and wise.

            He shook his head, not sure what the gesture meant even as he made it, and leaned down to press a kiss against her lips. She returned the gesture after a moment, a surprised breath and then she was pressing into his space, folding him around her. He found himself running his hands up and down her back and sides, mapping out every angle of her, and not for the first time he could see the appeal of Braille, of sign language, of a way of communicating that was fundamentally and physically real, not just marks floating in metaphysical space.

            She stopped the kiss but didn’t pull away, instead tucking her head into the curve where his shoulder met his neck. They stood there, breathing together, him tracing her outline with his hands, her pressing gentle kisses against his throat, a steady beat of _I’m here, I’m here, I’m with you, I’m here_ in time with his pulse. She stopped for a moment and chuckled lowly.

            “What?”

            “It’s too early for ‘thank god we’re not dead’ sex.”

            “Huh. I disagree,” he stopped his hands’ exploration to lock both arms around her waist, pulling her even closer and chuckling into her hair when she snorted at his silliness.

            “Come on, you,” she said, tugging gently on the close-cropped ends of his messy blond hair, “Time to go save the world.”

            Clint whined theatrically as she pulled away, but he was smiling when she kept ahold of his hand and tugged him along after her as they left to deal with the world’s larger-than-life problems.

…

            Loki suggested Matt play the entirety of Clint’s message on speakerphone for ‘educational purposes’. Kate suggested Matt toss Loki off a fire escape for ‘entertainment purposes’. In the interest of domestic harmony, Matt let Kate listen to the message not on speakerphone (it wasn’t like he wouldn’t be able to hear every word anyway), then, with Kate’s permission, played it on speaker for the curious Loki.

            Honestly, Matt wasn’t sure what to expect the godling’s reaction to be. If pressed, he supposed his answer would be somewhere along the lines of ‘more of the same’. He figured Loki would be just as imperious and dismissive of Clint’s offhand, jumbled, genuine affection as he had been of everything else in Matt’s life. But Loki was oddly…still as the message played. His core temperature, already low, dropped even lower, leaving a definite cold spot in Matt’s senses. Almost like a ghost. The Asgardian didn’t say anything as the words played, and when the message ended with a “see you when we get back” from Clint and a crisp, automated “End of message,” from Matt’s phone, Loki seemed…lost in thought, almost.

            Even Kate seemed to have picked up on their ‘guest’s strange mood. When she said, “That good enough for you, home invader?” it didn’t come out harsh so much as uncertain and almost gentle.

            Loki sniffed. Not quite a holding-back-tears sniff (Matt would have smelled the salt from actual tears), but not quite a disdainful sniff either. “Your family is very…unusual. Perhaps it is because you are not royalty.” He continued before Matt or Kate could get indignant over the statement’s elitist tone, “My father would not have personally informed me of his intentions prior to going into battle. There would have been different expectations. For me. I wasn’t a warrior. Not like my…not like Thor.”

            That seemed to be all Loki was willing to share with them as he abruptly stiffened, handed the phone to Kate, and stalked off.

            “Did he just storm off to brood in your room?” Kate asked, tone uncertain.

            “Yes,” Matt said grimly.

            “Oh, okay.”

            “Foggy made it very clear what the consequences would be if Loki stole his room.”

            “And those were?”

            “He bought a dozen cans of shaving cream and a dozen cans of Kool Whip and covered Loki in both while he was sleeping. We were doing laundry for the rest of the day trying to get the horrible sugary gunk off everything, but Foggy still says it was worth it for the look on Loki’s face.”

            Kate’s snickers had evolved into full-body laughter by the end of Matt’s story. “So why didn’t you do the same in your room?”

            Matt gave her a pained look, “I can still smell lingering Kool Whip stench from _Foggy’s_ room. I’m not that much of a masochist.”

            That was enough to set his sister off laughing again. Foggy was probably going to laugh too when he got home with dinner. Matt sighed; why did he have to be the mature one? He thought vigilantism automatically disqualified him from maturity.  

…

            Tony, like all his fellow Avengers, came home from the mission tired, crabby, and sore. Well, Bruce had passed out on the flight back – worn out from the physical stress of tromping through Midwestern cornfields as his less-than-jolly green alter ego. Tony manfully resisted the urge to ask JARVIS to add Jolly Green Giant Brand canned corn to the grocery order. See? He was getting better at socialization.

            But back to the crabby thing. All the squishy humans on the team – except for Barton, the lucky helicopter-riding-enemy-sniping bastard, had to take a nice long decontamination shower in case of exposure to whatever weird shit the mad-scientists-wannabes used on their ill-fated experiments, plus a check-over from SHIELD medical to make sure there weren’t any ‘adverse affects’ from the aforementioned potential weird shit. This meant Natasha, Tony, and even Steve and Bruce found themselves dutifully filing through the SHIELD medical circus. Tony knew for a _fact_ Thor was laughing at them. But not in a mean way, that wasn’t Thor’s deal. They could be sure that any humor on the Asgardian’s part was as good-natured as a box of puppies. Just. Seriously. Ugh. Tony didn’t know why he even tried sometimes. This superhero gig was clearly nothing but endless punishment.

            Tony managed to get out before the rest of the increasingly-harassed-looking team (except for Barton, because apparently being out of range got you a free pass from the SHIELD decontamination circus) and slip up the common room, determined to make himself some hot chocolate – okay, coffee with a packet of Swiss Miss mixed in, let’s be honest – before bed. But he found himself stopping short in the doorway when the bizarre sight of _Daredevil_ (and how the _fuck_ did he get in here – oh, wait…JARVIS you bastard) and Hawkeye (who unfortunately, lived there and could not be explained away)…sitting on the couch drinking beer. Together. Like this was normal. Like they were bros that did this shit all the time.

            Tony was so confused.

            “Stark, you could stand there and watch us drink your very expensive beer or you could join us,” Daredevil said oh-so-casually and Tony glared at him like a kid who’s been caught spying on his parents’ conversations.

            “Just taking a moment to ponder whether or not I want to be associated with you two fashion disasters,” Tony drawled, “And I’m in more of a hot-chocolate mood myself.” What was he even saying? When two very dangerous people in tactical gear (even if one clearly has some kind of religion-induced complex – see, this is why the pope and Tony were not on speaking terms – faith according to Tony Stark just leads you down dark paths featuring red Kevlar and devil’s horns) suggest you join them for a beer, you do not babble about hot cocoa like a five-year-old. Tony was forcibly reminded of a particularly unfortunate stage of his early life (read: when he was 14 and at MIT and survived only by the grace of God and James Rhodes) when he was 100% convinced that he could make any number of conventionally lame things cool just by force of personality. This assumption was theoretically incorrect but still managed to gain a surprising amount of traction in practice due to the obscene amount of money Tony had in his checking account.

            But back to the Very Dangerous People in his living room…who did not actually seem fazed by the hot cocoa segue. They actually seemed…intrigued, judging by the way Clint was eyeing him and Daredevil’s mask was…glowering in his general direction. That cowl was really hard to read.

            A moment of stillness as, presumably, the people on the couch assessed the potential enjoyment to be gained from a mug full of glorious, liquid chocolate topped off with fluffy marshmallows and enlivened by a generous helping of coffee, because Tony went caffeinated or went home. Then Clint did something completely unexpected. He turned to Daredevil and said, with the same tone of wonder small children reserve for things like Santa Claus; “ _Hot chocolate._ ”

            And Daredevil just huffed and said; “ _Fine,_ but we’re doing this right,” then nonchalantly parkour-flipped over the back of the sofa to make his way to the kitchen.

            “That, that is not normal right there,” Tony surmised.

            “I could totally do that if I wanted to!” Clint, who was apparently electing not to participate in Tony’s side of the conversation, yelled after his companion.

            Daredevil snorted, “Sure, if you wanted to throw out your back.”

            “Is that a challenge?”       

            “No.”

            “I think it’s a challenge.”

            “I think whatever you’re about to do is a terrible idea.”

            “Bring it.”

            “As you can see; I am ‘bringing’ nothing.” Daredevil had reached the kitchen by now and stood in the center of the place, surveying it like he was some kind of conquering imperialist and the cabinets were the colonies he was going to build in the name of king and country. “JARVIS, is there any baking chocolate?”

            _No way there’s baking chocolate,_ Tony thought.

            “Yes, sir, on the top shelf of the cabinet directly across from you,” JARVIS informed him crisply.

            Okay, so apparently Tony wasn’t the only one who needed to be restrained from making changes to the grocery list.

            “Milk or half and half?” Daredevil asked as he unloaded what might have been a block but looked more like a brick of baking chocolate from the shelf.

JARVIS began to respond but halfway through his statement they all heard Clint shout “Parkour!” and come crashing to the ground as he flipped his way off the couch too.

“That, that was graceful,” he summed up from the floor.

“Tasteful too,” Daredevil said blandly, a smirk tugging up the corners of his lips.

“Hey, respect your elders,” Clint mock-admonished.

Meanwhile, Tony was watching as a vigilante assembled the ingredients for traditional, homemade hot chocolate. Red-leather-gloved hands poured half a carton of whole milk into a saucepan and set it on the stove to simmer before turning to the brick of chocolate. “Knives, JARVIS?” Daredevil asked, because apparently he was more at home with Tony’s AI than Tony.

“I’ve got a knife,” Clint offered; peeling himself off the floor to meander into the kitchen.

Daredevil made a very expressive face for someone whose eyes were covered by a mask. “ _No_.”

“Hey, don’t shun the utility knife,” Clint said lightly.

Daredevil’s lips thinned and he shot what Tony would bet good money was something akin to Pepper’s Very Patient Look at his companion.

JARVIS took the moment to interject and redirect Daredevil to elsewhere on his knife search while Tony tried to recalibrate his brain to accept a reality in which New York’s resident vigilante made fancy hot chocolate in his kitchen, with his AI.

“I’m sorry, where am I? What funky, alternate universe is this? Is there a conductor, a driver, a wizard or something that I can speak to?”

“What, Tony, not used to super-people randomly showing up in your kitchen yet?” Clint asked, hopping up on the counter while Daredevil sliced chocolate into wafer-thin pieces and dropped them into the steaming milk, occasionally pausing to stir the mixture with a spoon he Clint must have found for him when Tony wasn’t paying attention.

“Anyway,” Clint shrugged, “The hot chocolate was your idea.”

Tony opened his mouth, about to say something, realized he was sore, tired, and crabby from a day spent fighting the forces of evil and really didn’t have the energy to squabble with the team’s resident smart-mouth and his devilish sidekick. So he asked a question instead, “Since when do you know Lucifer here?”

Clint shrugged, “I’ve know him about fifteen years. We fight crime together. Until Natasha and Phil have to save our asses.”

“Save _your_ ass, you mean,” Daredevil muttered without real malice.

“Hey, respect your elders,” Clint said without venom.

“So you run around New York with Satanic Batman on your off days?” Tony asked, only half kidding.

“Yeah, except together we fight crime,” Clint said.

“And I’m actually Catholic,” Daredevil said in the tone of someone who has had to make this point many times before and anticipates having to make it many times again.

“Wow, you two are just _the_ life of the party, let me tell you. So, the devil suit, is it a sex thing? Did it start as a sex thing? Seriously, how do you go from god-fearing bible-thumper to devil-suit-wearing vigilante?”

What was visible of Daredevil’s face was as bright red as his suit so Tony was going to have to go with it _not_ being a sex thing.

Clint seemed to struggle for words while the devil himself appeared rendered slightly speechless. Clint won the battle for language first and said, emphatically, “ _No,_ it is _not_ a ‘sex thing’. It’s some kind of extended metaphor. Ask the kid for details,” and turning his attention to his cocoa-making sidekick, he added, “Kid, it had better not be a sex thing. Otherwise we’re going to have to do the talk all over again and that was bad enough the first time.”

Daredevil worked his jaw, but was apparently recovered enough to grit out, “It is not a sex thing. And I didn’t come up with the name. Someone else did and so I went with the motif. It’s…symbolic. It’s a metaphor.”

Tony snickered, “Wait, so, _you,_ ” he pointed at Clint, “Bow-and-Arrow-Batman and had to give _him_ ,” now he pointed at Daredevil, “Devil-in-the-Details-Robin _The Talk_?”

“No,” Daredevil’s eyes weren’t exactly clearly visible but Tony got the feeling they were being rolled pretty hard, “That was middle school health class. This jerk just likes to pretend he’s a good role model.”

“I’m the best role model,” Clint said smugly.

Tony squinted at the two of them, and finally just shook his head, “Whatever. You’re weird, I’m tired, gimme cocoa.”

“That’s the spirit,” Clint said as Daredevil motioned for mugs and poured his concoction into the waiting cups.

And you know what? It was damn good cocoa.

…

“First Captain America, now Tony Stark? Why do you get to hang out with all the cool superheroes?”

“Probably because my parents are cool superheroes and I go out and risk my life daily to make the city a better place.”

“But mostly because your parents are cool superheroes.”

“Yeah, go nepotism.”

“And no talking about potential dying, Matty, it worries the cactus.”

“Foggy, you can’t pawn your feelings off on the cactus you stole from Mrs. Algernon down the hall.”

“One, it did not steal it, I liberated it from an oppressive regime. Two, the cactus and I are very close on a spiritual level. It feels what I feel, Matty. And what we feel is worry when you talk about dying. We don’t want to inherit your record collected and kitchen full of health food. We want you to be around to be obnoxious about those things all on your own.”

“Well if that’s not friendship.”

“Exactly, the cactus agrees.”

…

Matt had enjoyed cocoa with Clint and Tony more than he thought he would. Yes, Tony’s questions ranged from weird to rude to downright invasively weird and rude, but really, once he figured out the rhythm of Tony’s conversational style, it wasn’t too hard to keep up. Plus, the addition of cocoa allowed them to steer him away from specific questions like how Clint and Matt met. It wasn’t that Matt was ashamed of Clint being his stepfather, it was more that he wasn’t sure how much Tony should be allowed know about Daredevil, about his family. He knew his mom’s opinion – Natasha would play Two Truths and a Lie and make every fact a lie if she could. She was fond of secrets and the more secrets of hers people knew, the less secure she felt. She would probably be perfectly happy to never tell her teammates about Kate and Matt or Daredevil and Hawkeye (Clint and Kate had decided to share the name – they never really discussed it, just one day they were calling each other Hawkeye and it stuck). And Clint, in his way, was a very private person too. He wasn’t likely to share anything beyond the minimum of real, personal information if someone asked; and if no one asked then there wasn’t anything to share, was there?

It didn’t bother Matt, the casual, half-assed secrecy. He liked the distance plausible deniability gave him. He liked the idea of space between himself and the Avengers. He may have grown up with symptoms of SHIELD all around him, but he still liked the illusion that he might have a normal-adjacent life. It was comforting in its way.

Loki, as it turned out, was less than impressed with Matt’s attempts at balancing the normal with the superheroic. “Did you not comprehend my purpose in returning to Midgard?” Loki asked, snootiness turned up to eleven in the face of Matt’s retelling of cocoa with Stark and Barton (he’d had to leave before the rest of the team, including his mom, got out of medical – a mugging two blocks down that sounded too potentially violent to ignore).

“Are you seriously upset that Matt had hot chocolate with Clint and _Tony freaking Stark_ , - who, by the way, are not your biggest fans - without you? Because that, that would be crazy. And you’re pretending to be not-crazy right now, aren’t you?” Kate interjected.

Loki sniffed haughtily in her general direction. Kate made an unimpressed noise right back at him.

“If I am to complete my study of your family I must be allowed to observe actual interactions between yourself and your father-figure,” Loki said in his most supercilious tone.

“I bet you’re just disappointed you missed out on hot chocolate,” Foggy observed blandly.

“I am not,” Loki protested, albeit unconvincingly.

“Liar,” Matt pointed out somewhat unnecessarily.

“I mean, if family-bonding-via cocoa is what you wanted, we could always arrange some hot chocolate action right now,” Foggy offered.

That seemed to bring Loki up short. “That would be…possible?” he asked, sounding genuinely confused.

“Yeah,” Kate’s voice was a little milder this time, “It’s really no big deal.”

“Then yes, yes I would like some of this heated chocolate.”

“ _Hot_ chocolate,” Foggy corrected gently.

“It is heated, is it not?”

“You know what, I’m just not gonna fight that battle,” Foggy conceded, “Now, who’s up for some heated chocolate?”

…

            “Is this common for…siblings?” Loki asked, once the cocoa was dished out and they were all sprawled in Foggy and Matt’s cramped living room with The Voice on low on the television.

            Matt, unsure how to answer, took another sip of his drink. Meanwhile, Kate hummed thoughtfully. “I don’t know,” she finally said, “My sister and I – I’ve got an older sister, a blood one, and it’s not that we hate each other, it’s just that we’re not all that close. Our family’s not really into hugs and kisses and feelings. But Matt and Foggy are different. Probably because I picked them. I think, in the end, you pick who you love. Whether or not the people you love are your blood relatives. There has to be that choice, where you decide that this person is important to you, that they’re a priority to you, that their happiness and safety and, I don’t know, _existence_ makes you happy, and that you love them. For most people, it’s easy, they pick their blood family and their blood family picks them and it’s all this natural, unconscious thing they don’t even have to think about.” Kate paused to collect her thoughts or catch her breath and Foggy jumped in.

            “I got lucky, my blood family’s mostly like that. We all just naturally picked each other, my mom, dad, sisters and me. My grandparents too. We just _work_. But that doesn’t mean I can’t choose to love Matt and Kate like family too. They’re important to me. They’re my family too.”

            Kate, recovered, took over from there, “My dad, he didn’t choose me. I’m so low on his priorities list I’m practically a footnote. But Natasha and Clint and Matt and Foggy? They picked me; they chose to love me. I know I’m always safe with them; that they’ll take care of me and I’ll take care of them. Dammit, now I’m getting all leaky,” she sniffled, and Matt could hear the wet drag of her scrubbing at her cheeks with her wrist and taste the salt in the air.

            Matt reached over and stroked his little sister’s hair, opening his arms when she leaned into him and just holding her in a loose hug. “My dad…he chose me. I always knew - when he was alive - who I was, where I stood in the world. I was Jack Murdock’s son and he loved me more than anything. That he would do anything to keep me safe. And then he died and no one wanted me. Until I met Natasha. And I belonged somewhere again. I was safe again. I bullied Clint into being my friend, but when he had the chance to leave, he just kept coming back. He picked us too.”

            They sat in stillness for a few moments as they all processed what they’d just said and heard. Then Matt interrupted with one more revelation, “Maybe we’re like puzzle pieces?” his voice tipped upwards at the end of the sentence, uncertain, feeling his way through the idea as he said it, “We all want to fit into the big picture somewhere. And sometimes we’re lucky and we fall out of the box already locked in with the right pieces beside us. And sometimes we’re corner pieces and it’s just obvious where we go. And sometimes we’re jumbled in the middle or we get separated from the pieces we were originally connected to. And we spend ages shuffling through the other pieces, building a picture around us until we’ve found or built a place for us to fit. With other pieces in place all around us.”

            Another moment, another pause as they weighed the merit of Matt’s metaphor. Finally Foggy let out a hoarse chuckle, “Buddy, I can’t tell if that’s the most profound thing I’ve ever heard, or if you just sound high as a kite.”

            It was enough to break the tension and send Matt and Kate off into a laughing jag that turned a little weepy and gaspy towards the end. Even Loki joined in, his laugh a sad little dry sound like a plant that hasn’t been watered enough.

            “As an infant I was taken as a spoil of war,” Loki finally said when the hysterics had wound down, “I was raised alongside Thor, as if we were both true sons of Odin. But true sons of Odin are not children. They are not so much nurtured as trained. Trained to rule, to compete, to fight. Odin had little time for me; my interests were of no use to him. They did not grow his influence or impress his followers. Thor was the favored son. In the interest of _fairness_ ,” Matt could hear the way Loki scrunched up his face at the word, as if having to admit fairness played any part in the story he told was physically painful, “Thor was never intentionally cruel to me as children. But Odin’s preference was obvious. And Thor is…clumsy in his affection. Perhaps he wished to be a good brother, but I was an incomprehensible mystery to him and he to me. It was easy to resent him, after a time.” Loki paused a moment, perhaps to collect himself, or maybe just to breathe, “I love my mother, though,” his voice was sharp and fierce, his heartbeat steady and strong. Matt believed him. “The wife of Odin she may be, but she is nothing like him. She is fierce, and patient, and kind, and wise.” A bitter little laugh, “I suppose you could say of my family and me, Odin chose an object, Thor chose an idea, and Mother chose a person.”

            He stopped speaking abruptly, the only sound the rasp of air through his lungs as he breathed in and out. Kate made a small noise and pulled away from Matt slightly – but not enough to entirely remove herself from the hug, reached out, and took Loki’s hand. The soft sound as the god squeezed her hand back was almost too quiet for even Matt to hear.

…

            After that, things seemed to thaw between Loki and the rest of the apartment’s inhabitants. At the very least, his condescending remarks had lost a great deal of their edge. The bite was still there in the words, but it was no longer quite so cruel.

            “What have you earthlings done to your food products?” Loki would say, scanning the list of ingredients on the side of a cereal box, “This all sounds well-nigh inedible.”

            And Matt would mutter “Exactly,” while Foggy rolled his eyes and said, “Congratulations, Matthew, a conquest-happy megalomaniac agrees with you about nutrition.”

            At which point Loki would begin to actively read off the list of ‘well-nigh inedible’ chemicals to be found in Frosted Flakes and Kate would pull a face and offer to make eggs.

            Matt hated to admit it, but living with a demi-god, his best friend, and his little sister was beginning to seem almost…peacefully domestic.

            This was what happens when your parents became superheroes. The world stops making sense and you find yourself agreeing with the Norse god of deceit over the evils of partially-hydrogenated soybean oil and high fructose corn syrup while eating ‘scrambled eggs’ your sister left in the pan too long and now more resembled egg pancakes.

…

            “ _You._ You are a tricky son of a bitch.”

            Clint blinked at the finger suddenly thrust in his face. “Tony, get your hands out of my face.”

            “You and that kid in the devil suit. Tricky tricksters the lot of you.” Tony did retract the finger, but only to wave it and the hand it was attached to about as emphatically as possible.

            “Okay, so I know I’m a tricky son of a bitch, it’s kind of a point of pride, thanks, but why’s the kid a liar all of a sudden?” He’d had to stop himself from saying ‘Matt’ instead of ‘the kid’. He’d gotten soft about secrets. Matt and Kate were such open (or not-secret-at-all depending on who you asked) secrets at SHIELD; it took conscious effort to will the kid’s name out of his mind.

            “I spend over an hour with you two…” more hand-waving, “ _deceivers,_ and literally all I learn about either of you is that you’ve known each other since that Daredevil kid was an ass-kicking munchkin and that the kid’s a Catholic who wears devil footie pajamas to fight crime.” Tony shook his head, “Well played, sir, well played.” And then he was bounding off, yelling near-incomprehensible commands at JARVIS about data accumulation and interpretation.

            “Um, JARVIS?” Clint asked, a little stunned and confused, “What that actual hell?”

            If AIs could sigh, Clint would have bet JARVIS just did, “Mr. Stark is determined to understand Daredevil. He finds him equal parts fascinating and confusing as, quote, ‘all hell’ end quote.”

            Clint supposed Tony was a little bit right; Matt’s brain was a huge mystery to him even knowing who he was under the mask. But that didn’t make Tony turning Daredevil into a pet curiosity project a good idea. It in fact remained a heinously, emphatically _bad_ idea.

            “What the hell’s Tony planning on doing with that information when he finds it?” Clint did not growl, but it was close.

            “I do not know,” JARVIS said, “Sir is curious about what is happening in New York as well as nation-wide; with these grass-roots vigilantes popping up every which way. He is curious about Daredevil; yes, but he is also prying into what this sudden influx of home-grown superheroes – as well as super-powered adversaries means.”

            “…’Signaling that Earth is ready for a higher form of war’…” Clint quoted.

            “But are we correlation or causation?” JARVIS asked, tone as grave as any human.

            “What is Tony proposing we _do_ about any of this?” Clint’s whole body was tense, thinking of Matt, of Kate.

            “Nothing,” the AI said simply, “In fact, I suspect he hasn’t even thought of the deeper implications of his interest. Right now he’s just bothered by the presence of something big and obvious that he doesn’t know or understand.”

            “But you’ve thought everything out,” Clint said, only half as accusing as he probably would have been, had his brain not been spinning around the question of Kate and Matt.

            “I have some theories,” JARVIS demurred, “I think perhaps something is coming, someone or someones very powerful are making some kind of move in the shadows and the little – mostly metaphorical – fires these new young heroes are putting out in the underworld are merely the outer rings of some kind of great ripple effect. But I have no evidence.”

            “Huh,” Clint said, brain chewing on this new information. Phil and Natasha always said Clint saw things differently; came at problems from a different angle. He still remembered that last night guarding the Tessaract, when all those brilliant scientists with their clipboards and glasses and lab coats forgot something so basic a carnie-turned-sniper picked up on: that doors open both ways. “You may be onto something, Jarv,” Clint finally said, still reflecting.

            “Thank you, sir,” JARVIS said, and he sounded…relieved. Probably glad someone was finally listening to him. That Clint hadn’t laughed at him.

            “Nah, thank _you_ ,” he and Phil and Nat needed to talk, see if they could find the source of the ripples JARVIS had picked up on. But in the meantime… “Hey, Jarv?”

            “Yes, sir.”

            “Tony…he’s not gonna endanger the kid, right?”

            “No. Mr. Stark’s curiosity is mostly harmless.”

            “Good. Because that kid’s important to me, and I’ll put an arrow in anyone who hurts him, okay?”

            “Understood, sir. Shall I pass the message along?”

            “Yeah, thanks. You’re a good guy.”

            “I strive for excellence in all things,” JARVIS deadpanned and Clint laughed with his whole body.

…

            “Good evening, Mr. Stark.”

            Tony swore and leaped foot in the air, spinning around to spot Daredevil sitting at the kitchen table, serenely…folding origami. “What the actual fuck?” Tony yelped, “I have a heart condition!”

            Daredevil tipped his head to the side, considering, “Yes, yes you do. I had wondered about the irregularity.”

            Tony snorted, “Excellent, the kid in devil pjs acknowledges the glowing blue device implanted in my chest. Fabulous.”

            Daredevil’s lips thinned and he made a small sound, like he was disappointed in Tony, or perhaps himself – and went back to folding squares of paper into tidy little shapes.

            “Sooo,” Tony dragged out the word like a child dragging their feet on the way to the dentist’s office, “What’cha making?”

            “Cranes,” Daredevil replied tersely, putting a crease sharp enough to draw blood in a piece of shiny black paper with a delicate red and silver pattern picked out across it.

            Tony nodded like this was a totally normal thing for a vigilante to do in his kitchen at 2am. “Cool, cool. Well, I’ll just be here, drinking all the coffee and y’know, being a genius.” He scooped up the tablet that had been the original object of his out-of-lab quest, poured himself another mug of sweet, sweet caffeinated bliss, and settled in at the breakfast bar to engineer something brilliant. Well, actually to fiddle with Iron Man modifications. Everyone had their hobbies, right? Right.

            Daredevil, at the kitchen table, did not seem to care what Tony did with himself, all of the vigilante’s attention was on the delicate pieces of patterned paper in his hands. His gloves were off and his fingers were in constant motion, twisting around each fragile little paper crane, feeling out their edges.

            Tony wasn’t sure how long they sat together like that, Tony lost in an engineering haze, his masked companion apparently absorbed in the art of paper-folding. It could have been hours, or it could have been minutes. He supposed this was the feeling that other people meant when they talked about the virtues of meditating. The strange, dreamlike calm that descended on Tony only in those rare times when he was on the verge of creating something. Oh yes, he’d tried all the meditation, deep breaths, what-have you. The whole yoga shtick. None of it stuck. But this, this mild fugue state he slid into when in the midst of a really great project? That was great.

            It was almost enough to keep the darkness away. That horrible, soul-eating darkness that he’d stared in the face that day with the missile. The kind of darkness that stares back and doesn’t laugh because it is far too vast to care about the feelings of fragment of a fragment such as yourself.

            Daredevil folded another crane; Tony tweaked another component.

           And there was momentary peace.

…

            An unknown time later and Daredevil stood up, his crane army finished and arranged artfully on the table in some pattern Tony was too entrenched in his project to care about.

            “Goodbye, Mr. Stark,” the vigilante said, oddly formal, making to exit the room.

            Tony slipped out of his creation-trance just enough to jerk his head in a vague approximation of an acknowledging gesture and said “Yeah, bye, Double-D.”

            Daredevil was almost gone when Tony shook his head and said, “Hey, does this mean we’re friends?”

            The silence stretched long enough Tony almost stopped caring about the potential non-conversation enough to slip back into his work, when suddenly, a chuckle from Daredevil and the words; “Sure. We can be friends.”

            “Huh, cool,” Tony said, half under his breath, already careening back towards a mental landscape that was only blueprints and raw genius, “Still gonna figure out what your deal is, though.”

            He wasn’t listening when JARVIS remarked dryly, “Mr. Daredevil has said, quote ‘you can try’ end quote.”

…

            “So, what you’re buddies with Tony Stark now?”

            “Yes, Foggy, it would appear so.”

            “Huh. Think you can get his autograph so we can sell it on Ebay and pay our rent on time for once?”

            “…I hadn’t thought of that.”

            “Seriously? Be more devious next time. Live up to your Slytherin name, make your house proud!”

            “You’ve been re-reading Harry Potter again, haven’t you?”

            “Hey, me ad Loki get bored waiting for you. And sometimes we read classic children’s literature. And sometimes we don’t. And sometimes my mother’s tawdry romance novels wander onto our shelves so Kate and I bookclub them so we can make as many snide remarks as possible.”

            “Uh-huh.”

            “I lead a very full and eventful life in your absence.”

            “I’m sure.”

…

            “Nat.”

            “Clint. Move.”

            “Nat.”

            “Clint. You’re blocking the entry into the kitchen.”

            “Nat, cranes.”

            “Clint, move or I will move you.”

            “Nat, crane Avengers. Crane-vengers.”

            Natasha, sighing in impatience, swept Clint’s feet from underneath him, caught him before he could face-plant into the ground, allowed him to catch her in a playful wrestling hold, struggled with him a bit on principle (and not at all because he was warm and solid and feeling his heart thundering under his skin was more comforting than she could describe), and finally broke free to stride into the kitchen. Only to stop dead at the kitchen table to stare at the collection of neatly folded paper cranes that had so fascinated Clint.

            “See?” Clint said, sounding vindicated, “Crane-vengers.”

            “They’re beautiful,” Natasha said quietly, a small smile curling around her lips. She reached out a delicate hand to gently touch the sharp points of one’s wings.

            “That’s me,” Clint, who had picked himself off the ground and come to stand beside her said. He pointed at the paper it was made from, “See? Purple, grey, black. My colors.”

            “And it has a little paper quiver with little toothpick arrows to go with it,” Natasha pointed out archly. But he was right about the colors. Kate must have gone with Matt to pick the papers out, helping him match each to the correct Avenger.

            “Look, there’s a Katie-Kate Hawkeye too,” Clint said cheerfully, pointing out smaller crane made out of purple paper with white and silver accents. It (she?) had a tiny quiver and tinier arrows too. “And look, there’s you,” Clint ran a surprisingly gentle finger down the wing of a crane bigger than the Kate-crane but slightly smaller than the Clint-crane, made out of primarily black paper with a delicate red and silver design across it.

            “And here’s Matt,” Natasha pointed out the bright red crane – bigger than Kate’s but smaller than Natasha’s – with a bold, geometric black pattern on it.

            The rest of the team began filtering into the kitchen and, one by one, exclaiming over their origami doppelgangers. Natasha and Clint’s crane family was joined by an enormous green and purple Hulk crane (accompanied by a smaller, pastel purple and brown Bruce crane – a thoughtful touch), a gaudy gold and candy-apple-red Iron Man crane, a patriotic red white and blue Cap crane (featuring a tiny shield), a red, gold and blue Thor crane (complete with tiny folded-paper hammer), a crane made out of plaid-patterned paper they all concluded was Jane, a neon-toned multicolored crane everyone assumed was Darcy, a delicate white crane with a copper and gold pattern they realized was meant to be Pepper, and finally a black and white crane they all knew was Coulson.

            _“The kid has way too much time on his hands,_ ” Clint muttered to Natasha in Russian.

            _“He misses us._ ”

            _“He’s like a cat – he’s literally leaving us birds in order to win our affection.”_

_“He must be bored.”_

_“He’ll Kitchen needs to step up their game, then. Because he’s going to keep breaking in to prove he can until he’s distracted.”_

_“True.”_

            Of course that was when Tony appeared from behind the couch, a StarkPad falling into his lap from where it’d stuck to his face. “Devil-y bastard didn’t tell me he was making _Avengers_ cranes,” he whined, “Gimme, Iron-Crane, Steve, he and Crane America can fight; it’ll be great.”

            Steve, who had been caught holding both the cranes, blinked, momentarily stymied by the inventor’s sudden appearance and even more sudden demands, walked over to Tony’s couch and handed over the red and gold crane seemingly more because he couldn’t think of any alternative actions.

            “Sweet!” Tony beamed like a kid at Christmas, “Now come on, Steve, we’ve gotta assemble the rest of the crane-vengers. We can make Chitauri invaders for them to fight out of tinfoil.”

            And that was how a bemused Natasha and amused Clint spent the rest of the morning playing aliens vs. superheroes on the floor of the living room with paper cranes.

            Matt was _never_ to know of this if they could help it.

…

            “I wish to see more of this city you are so ludicrously fond of,” Loki said archly, sitting the counter and observing as Matt prepared breakfast. Well, most notably refusing to _get out of the way_ when Matt needed more counter space to continue the breakfast preparations.

            “No,” Matt refused on instinct, continuing to slice peppers for omelets.

            “How am I to be convinced that I should not conquer your planet and raze it to its core if I do not become familiar with its idiosyncrasies? With any luck, I’ll be charmed by the plucky humans and their earnest attempts at advanced civilization and I’ll feel heartily ashamed of my previous conquest-related activities.”

            “ _Or,_ more likely, you cause some sort of scene and the Avengers are called and we all get into trouble.”

            “Excellent. I’d be able to observe your interactions with both your parents.”

            Matt did not stab himself with the knife in order to escape this conversation. Matt counted that as a sing of maturity. “You are less than inconspicuous.”

            Loki snorted, “I’ve been wearing your cast-offs for weeks now. I have grown accustomed to Midgardian grab.”

            Matt sighed. “This is a terrible idea,” he said more to the ceiling than Loki, tipping his head back as if praying for patience.

            “I shall give you time to contemplate it’s virtues,” Loki allow magnanimously.

            “How exquisitely kind of you,” Matt growled under his breath, turning his attention to mincing mushrooms with extreme prejudice.

…

            “I have some ideas about the kid in the suit,” Bruce told Tony after the impromptu Crane Battle had broken up (all the cranes were intact and damage-free, everyone was happy to note). The rest of the team (and various team-affiliated people such as Jane and Darcy) had retreated to their own quarters to find places of honor for their new folded-paper likenesses.

            “What?” Tony asked, still a little loopy from staying up all night.

            “From the shwarma place,” Bruce reminded him. “You want to figure out who he is, right?”

            “Yes, yes, what do you have?”

            “I have the SHIELD personnel database that you hacked into for kicks that one time. We can comb through the 20-30-year-old men that fit his basic description and see if we can track our mystery kid down.”

            Tony beamed at him. “Perfect.”

…

            ‘ _I hate you’_ Matt’s screen-reader narrateed balefully. He grined and waited for the next text to come in.

            ‘ _I’m disowning you. Like, right now.’_

_‘If you don’t ninja-parkour your ass here right now and end my suffering, Murdock, forget about being in my will.’_

_‘3…2…1…’_

_‘BAM – DISOWNED.’_

Kate’s texts presumably just devolved into a string of emojis from there – whatever her texts were doing, it was far too complicated for his screen-reader to cope with it.

            Matt chuckled to himself and dictated a reply, “Your sacrifice is not without its own reward.”

            Her reply was near-instantaneous. _‘Screw you and your cryptic ninja bullshit, I could have slept in this morning.’_

Matt grinned evilly and was about to narrate another text when Foggy wandered into the living room.

“Oh, shit, what fresh hell are you preparing to rain on the unsuspecting citizens of New York?” Foggy grumbled, “You’re grinning the grin of the truly deranged, and let me tell you, it does not look good on you, Matthew.”

“I sent Kate to a Macy’s with Loki.”

This seemed to take a moment to fully compute for Foggy. “You sent your baby sister to a department store with _the actual god of mischief_? What kind of sick bastard are you?” But Foggy was laughing as he said it, his chuckles cushioning any blows the words might have landed.

Matt shrugged, “Loki was getting stir-crazy. He needed some of his own ‘Midgardian’ clothes, and I can’t do malls or big stores without someone to guide me – it gets too disorienting. You were at the farmer’s market – ”

“ – I got fresh avocadoes, by the way.”

“ – Ha, you think you’re hilarious – ”

“ – Only because I am.”

“ – Shut up,” Matt laughed, flopping a hand vaguely in Foggy’s direction, listening to the rustle of bags, drinking in the scent of fresh fruit blooming in the air as his roommate extracted fresh produce from his bags, “So with you out, Kate would have had to guide me _and_ corral Loki at the same time and that would have just split her focus. So I stayed home.”

Foggy snorted, “You just didn’t want to deal with shopping-spree Loki.”

“Oh, I’m sure I’ll be dealing with it for the next six months,” Matt said mournfully, “I let Kate take my credit card.”

…

“Maybe we narrowed the search field too much?” Bruce suggested when their scan through SHIELD’s database didn’t turn up any hits.

Tony shook his head, “No, no, the guy would have to be between 18 and 30, stationed in New York in the last year or two, and have a history of close association with both Romanoff and Barton. Anything else doesn’t make sense!” Tony threw up his hands in an exaggerated gesture of exasperation.

“Want me to scan some other SHIELD databases?” Bruce asked.

Tony beamed, “Aw, little baby hacker all grown up and picking which databases to plunder!”

Bruce rolled his eyes at him, but Tony was pretty sure it was a friendly sort of eye-roll.

…

“That’s it, you’re not allowed to speak to a sales assistant ever again,” Kate declared, steering Loki away from the latest in what was becoming a line of flummoxed, offended, and generally irate salespeople the Asgardian had encountered on their shopping adventure.

Loki looked, of all things, perplexed, “Well if she was not going to provide me with what I requested, then she is hardly performing her occupation’s set tasks in a satisfactory manner.”

Kate sighed, the tail end of the sound twisting into an unbidden chuckle, “You ever consider not talking like you’ve swallowed a dictionary?”

Loki arched a brow, “You think I should use more idioms?”

“Sure,” Kate shrugged, absently flicking through a rack of shirts, holding promising options up to Loki’s front to gauge their suitability.

Loki huffed, “My universal translator is not designed with your twenty-first century… _slang_ in mind.”

“Wait, hold up, universal translator?”

Loki nodded. “Yes, on Asgard it is referred to as AllSpeak. It is an ability of ours. I referred to it as a ‘universal translator’ in hopes that it would seem self-explanatory.” He shot her a reproachful look; disappointed she hadn’t caught on quicker.

“Huh,” Kate squinted at him, assessing, then tossed a bundle of the shirts she’d liked into his arms, “Try these on.”

Loki’s face scrunched up; confused.

Kate rolled her eyes, but the gesture was mostly friendly. “Just do it. It’s fun. Let me see what they look like and we’ll pick whatever works. Then we’re going to get ice cream.”

If anything, the furrow between Loki’s brows got deeper, “Ice cream?”

“Yeah,” Kate shrugged, carefully casual – it wouldn’t do to scare him off, “I figure ice cream’s a good place to start the Modern Earth Idioms conversation.”

Loki just stared at her, as if wondering what the catch was.

“No catch,” she shrugged, making sure to keep her posture open, “Just, if you’re gonna be here a while, you need to learn how to cope with normal human stuff like slang and salespeople.”

Loki stared at her for one long moment more before shaking his head, “You are a very peculiar person, Katherine Bishop,” he declared, before marching off in search of fitting rooms.

Kate did a discreet fist-pump behind his back. Yes! The ex-alien-invader had acknowledged her person-hood! Progress was made! Maybe this weird redemption-montage thing they had going on would work!

Momentarily, she found herself oddly caught, remembering the drawn, surprised look on Loki’s face when she offered to get him ice cream, to tutor him on modern idioms. She wondered how many times someone had made time to spend with him, just him in all the years of his youth.

She got the painful, all-to familiar feeling of being left alone.

Well, screw that. They weren’t on Asgard anymore. And if a little attention cured Loki of his need for planetary destruction/conquest then Dr. Kate was _in._ Plus…Kate pressed her lips together in an almost-grimace. She’d been so, so ready to hate Loki. To hate him for what he did to Clint, to _Phil,_ to fucking _New York_. But. How? How to hate someone who looked so lost, so agonized and alone? Who showed up at her brother’s apartment because he needed help, he needed to understand. And yeah, beneath the prickly, fierce vigilante coating, Matt was a huge softy – show him someone in need of help and he’d cave eventually. (“Clint, is there something wrong with me?” “Huh? Kid, why would there be something wrong with you?” “I don’t… _care_ the way Matt does.” “Yeah, you do, kid.” “How do you know?” “Because I’ve seen you in action. You care. Your brother…he doesn’t just _care_ , he takes a bit of everyone’s suffering inside him. He hangs onto it; he feels it with them. He’s like a…like a nerve, raw and screaming. You, you’ve got a distance he doesn’t have, that he doesn’t _get_ to have, because of his abilities. But you…you care, Kate. So much. It’s…astonishing.” “Thanks, Hawkeye.” “No problem, Hawkeye.”) The point was, Matt was always going to cave to Loki, let him stay for awhile. Matt’d beat Loki down if any harm had come to _anyone_ while the godling was under his roof – but yeah, Matt couldn’t help his compulsive need to help the downtrodden.

Kate just hadn’t expected to care so much about their weird houseguest’s well-being.

Fuck, she was pretty sure that made her friends with Thor’s evil little brother.

_‘Using your credit care to buy clothes and ice cream,’_ she texted Matt. After a moment’s thought she added, _‘And btw, I blame you 10000% for Stockholm-ing me into being friends with fucking Loki.’_

Matt send back a text that literally said _‘moderately sarcastic but mildly genuine smiley-face emoji – but not too smiley, more smirky,’_ because Matt’s screen reader tech didn’t do emojis and in protest to _everyone_ using them, he’d taken to describing in detail exactly what whatever emoji he might have used in any given situation if he wasn’t blind.

            _‘You’re a brat,’_ she sent back.

            _‘Am I still disowned?’_ he asked.

            _‘No, grumble, grumble,’_ she replied.

            _‘Good, because I know some excellent lawyers.’_

_‘Quit self-advertising, you ego-maniac.’_

_‘Now you sound like Foggy.’_

_‘Good, he’s the sensible one.’_

Kate locked her phone screen, still smiling, to look up to seem Loki, looking less than overwhelmed by the shirt option he was currently parading in front of her skeptical gaze.

            “I do not like this fabric. It chafes.”

            “Don’t you wear _leather_ armor? How does that not chafe?”

            Loki gave her an extra-expressive Look, “Armor protects the wearer. This merely annoys.”

            “Fine, fine, you big baby, try on something else.”

            Loki shot her another emotive look then flounced off the dressing room.

            Kate rolled her eyes good-naturedly and returned to text-sniping at Matt.

...

            “We need a new plan,” Bruce groaned, turning away from the holoscreens and rubbing at his eyes, “Because this isn’t working.”

            “Well there goes some of my theories,” Tony muttered, irritated.

            “He’s not there. He’s a ghost. There’s not agent, no staff member, no contact, nothing matching up to every variable. He’s not SHIELD, Tony.”

            “Then who the fuck is he?” Tony demanded, waving his arms erratically.

            Bruce sighed, “Who the hell knows?”

…

            Loaded down with shopping bags and dripping ice cream cones, Loki and Kate wandered the streets of New York, Loki staring at the sights with poorly concealed fascination.

            “People are not this…indecorous on Asgard,” he said, eyeing a woman in an American-flag-print string bikini and cowboy boots playing guitar in the middle of the sidewalk and a man a few yards away from her holding a ragged cardboard sign with ‘National Health Care Plan’ scribbled on it in crooked Sharpie letters, hawking condoms at outrageous prices.

            Kate shrugged, “It’s New York. It’s weird. It’s a thing.”

            “Earth has so many different _kinds_ of people,” Loki remarked in a tone of confused awe.

            Kate eyeballed him, “Are you being racist right now?”

            Loki continued as if she had not spoken, “On Asgard you are a warrior or a sorcerer of some kind. That is all.”

            “So no girls in skimpy swimwear singing off-key Shania Twain on the sidewalks?”

            “No.”

            “Asgard’s missing out.”

            “Do not joke, it does not suit you.”

            Kate rolled her eyes and punched him in the shoulder. Loki assumed, based on previous observations, that this was a friendly gesture. It reminded him strangely of Thor. But that was a wound he had no wish to prod right now.

            “You’re too serious,” Kate critiqued, “you internalize everything. It’s not healthy.”

            “And you’re some sort of expert?” Loki asked archly.

            Kate fixed him with a sharp look, “Yeah, I like to think I am.”

            That effectively silenced Loki for the moment. He continued his perusal of the city his ‘hosts’ seemed so enamored with. There was a man up ahead who was earnestly forcing pamphlets of some kind on passerby (further scrutiny suggested they were for some sort of alien-worshipping cult – and idea that made Loki feel both weirdly discomforted and nostalgic for the first time they’d visited earth so many thousand years before). They’d just passed a little table selling some sort of pastry and across the street he spotted someone who had, for no discernable reason – painted themselves silver and proceeded to pose like that for money.

            The city seemed strangely…vast like this. Like its own galaxy, it’s own organism, it’s own self-sustaining ecosystem.

            “How do you not feel lost?” Loki asked his companion, not entirely sure if he were speaking of the city or something bigger.

            “I made a place for me to fit into the big picture.” Kate, strangely, seemed to understand.

            “I attempted that. Many times. My attempts were…never successful. I spent my childhood heavy with the knowledge that I would never be Thor, that I would always come second. Then I learned the truth of my origins and it was as if a great weight were removed from my shoulders. My feelings of difference and apart-ness were justified. I was always right; my presence in these people’s lives was farcical. Absurd. So I played my part. And from there I fell. I fell to the feet of greater and more powerful beings than I. And they used me harshly.”

            “You showed up at Matt’s because what you saw in Clint’s brain – which is still ten types of fucked up and wrong for you to do that in the first place, you asshole – made you think that Matt could teach you how to build a place for yourself.”

            Loki did not respond, instead continuing to observe New York as they slid through it, like minnows in a stream. Every now and then he absently licked his ice cream, barely tasting the flavor.

            “You’ll figure it out,” Kate said, voice firm with absolute confidence.

            “How?”

            “I don’t know. That’s on you. But you’ll figure out because you have to. Need’s a good motivator.”

            The unshakable authority with which she made that pronouncement sent a laugh rattling out of Loki’s chest and into the world.

            “Thank you, Kate.”

            “It’s what I’m here for,” she said easily, “Now finish your ice cream, we need to get home.”

…

            “That’s weird,” Bruce muttered, hunched over a holographic table-style display.

            “Weird? What weird? I like weird,” Tony bounced over to where Bruce stood, brow furrowed, hands combing through the window he’d pulled up.

            “I found a couple of personnel files stuffed into a folder that don’t actually match anything.”

            “Okie dokie,” Tony said, “Show me your rogue files.”

            Bruce waved a hand and the holographic image hopped off the tabletop display to hang in the air before them. “See? They were stuffed into a boring file full of sanitation regulations. But they’re structured like personnel files, expect they don’t list SHIELD as an employer. Or anyone else for that matter.”

            “So who are they?” Tony stuck out his neck past the seated Bruce’s head in order to better eye the information.

            “Two people who aren’t SHIELD agents but have super-secret personnel files stashed away.”

            Tony grinned, “You smell what I smell?”

            Bruce stared at him, baffled, “Nothing, Tony, I smell nothing but your crazy.”

            “ _That_ smell, my friend,” Tony continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted, “is the smell of a conspiracy.”

…

            “I hate organized crime,” Matt whined, crawling through the window around midnight while Kate, Foggy, and Loki watched reality television in the living room. Loki smelled like department store and sounded like stiff cotton. He must be wearing some of his new clothes – he and Kate had apparently had some kind of bonding experience while at large in the city, they’d come home with an unexpected ease between the two of them Matt had never observed before.

            “Hey, buddy,” Foggy came over to help him up from where he’d face-planted on the floor in an exhausted puddle because _Foggy_ is a _good person_ , “You strain your shoulder again?”

            “Dislocated,” Matt muttered into the carpet, letting Foggy do most of the work to get him upright again because Matt is _not_ a good person, “Popped it back in but it hurts like a bitch.”

            “Buddy, you don’t start helping me out here and I’m just gonna leave you here on the floor,” Foggy sighed and Matt capitulated, helping to push his sore, weary body into a relatively stable seated position.

            “Need an ice pack?” Kate asked.

            “Yes,” Matt admitted grudgingly.

            “Do we have any ice packs?” Foggy muttered to himself, leaving Matt to go check the freezer, “ _Matt,_ quit eating the bags of frozen peas you health-food freak!” he griped, “Those are our ice packs, man!”

            “Hey, no, it’s no big deal, I can just swing by Avengers tower and grab you some,” Kate offered.

            “Or you could go to Mom and Clint’s apartment,” Matt pointed out.

            “Eh, I think Avengers tower is closer.”

            “False.”

            “I – ugh, come on, Matt, you’ve been in there a million times; I want a turn!”

            “Kate – ”

            “ – That sounded like agreement, bye!” And with that, Kate grabbed her bow and quiver and was out the window before Matt could stop her.

            “She was wearing her gear, wasn’t she?” Matt asked weakly.

            “Uh, yeah, sorry buddy,” Foggy sounded only a little bit contrite, “She was pretty set on visiting the tower tonight even if you didn’t need the help.”

            Matt sighed and resisted the urge to flop back on the floor.

…

            “There’s no name on one of these files.”

            “Photo?”

            “Nope.”

            “What about the other one?”

            “Photo, no name. But I think it’s our guy.”

            Tony kind of wants to smack his face into a worktable until the universe and SHIELD files function the way they’re supposed to. Well. More like ‘how he wants them to,’ since he’s pretty sure they’re not supposed to give up their content to any old hacker flouncing around the system. “So what you’re saying is we have a bunch of stats, no names, and only one picture, but we know that it’s the shwarma guy?”

            “Yeah, pretty much,” Bruce concedes.

            “I hate SHIELD,” Tony groaned into the tabletop, having given in to gravity and his own exasperation and just laying his face on the cool metal surface.

            “I’m not sure if this a positive or not, but shwarma kid’s combat stats are terrifying and our mystery person has a note attached to her file that just says ‘Hawkeye – the other one’.”

            Tony popped upright, “Time to harass birdbrain.”

            “Tony, no.”

            “Tony, yes!”

…

            Kate took a few minutes to just admire the scenery before heading for the freezer. Well, that was not precisely true. She took a few minutes to stand, frozen in place, trying to fast-talk Matt’s AI buddy JARVIS into believing that she wasn’t a threat.

            “I’m a friend of Daredevil’s,” she tried.

            JARVIS’ only response was a really menacing silence. Kate began to sweat.

            “Seriously, I’ll be gone in like, five minutes, I just need an icepack ‘cause the horn-headed dumbass didn’t restock the freezer in the apartment like he was supposed to.”

            More silence.

            “Did you know he eats frozen peas? It’s really weird,” she said for lack of anything better to say. She was beginning to wonder if she could just start shooting cameras and maybe confuse the super-computer in the walls enough to be able to effect her grand escape.

            “Did Daredevil seriously not mention me? Because that right there is a dick move.” Yes, shooting random stuff was sounding more and more appealing.

            “Daredevil did mention that he had a female associate. However, as I have no way of confirming your identity, I must believe you to be hostile and inform Sir and the Avengers of your presence. I am sure they will handle the situation as they see fit.”

            Well, shit. So this was not the smartest plan.

            Kate was opening her mouth, about ready to throw some words in the AI’s general direction and then start shooting when she was interrupted by Natasha’s dry, amused voice.

            “Stand down, JARVIS, Hawkeye is a friend,” the Black Widow said, coming up behind Kate and resting a maternal hand on her shoulder. Well, as maternal as any physical contact from one of the world’s most deadly spies could be.

            “That is not the Avenger designated as Hawkeye.” JARVIS actually sounded a little miffed, like it offended him that they had such an obviously low opinion of his powers of observation.

            “Yes and no,” Natasha said enigmatically. Kate resisted the urge to grumble at her foster mom’s apparent disregard for the imminent danger Kate had been in.

            “There’s two Hawkeyes,” Kate explained, sighing gustily, “The older one’s my…mentor…person…I guess.”

            “You sound so very certain,” JARVIS said dryly.

            “Yeah, well, you try describing Clint!” Kate snapped and that must have been what finally convinced the AI of her identity because she could hear the amused tone to his voice when he responded.

            “Too true, Ms Hawkeye.”

            “Uh, just Hawkeye is cool too. As in, call me that; it’s my name.”

            JARVIS still sounded amused as he said, “Very well, Hawkeye.”

            “Perfect,” Kate grinned in the vague direction of one of the cameras on the off-chance that JARVIS was ‘watching’ through those.

            Natasha hummed, amused, and leaned ever-so-slightly and ever-so-briefly against Kate’s side like a cat greeting a favorite person. “What brings you here?” she asked, moving away from Kate after the brief contact.

            “Ice packs for the horned menace,” Kate said, rolling her eyes.

            Natasha responded by narrowing hers, “You could have simply retrieved some from the apartment.”

            Kate grinned, unashamed, “I wanted to see Avengers tower. Matt got to hang out with Clint and Tony and drink cocoa. I want a domestic Avengers adventure!”

            Natasha chuckled, opening the freezer to extract three ice packs. Turning back to the kitchen proper and letting the fridge slam shut behind her, she busied herself bundling each ice pack into its own towel and stashing them all in Kata’s quiver.

            “Take these back to your brother,” Natasha instructed, handing the quiver back over when it was fully stocked. “And then come back. We’ll watch some of our movies and eat popcorn.” A flicker of a smile chased its way across Natasha’s lips. She didn’t have a particularly expressive face, and raising a blind son who could discern mood by a million tiny sounds rather than expression had really removed any great impetus to amplify or regulate what expressions she did have. But Kate didn’t really care. Natasha may not be like Matt or Clint, who wore their hearts on their sleeves and faces, whose sordid, violent lives were mapped out in the scar tissue on their skin, but she wasn’t really that hard to understand, if you put your mind to and used all your senses.

            Kate’s face broke into a grin at Natasha’s suggestion. “Sir, yes sir.”

            She was back at Matt and Foggy’s (and Loki’s too apparently) with the ice packs in record time.

…

            Tony glared at the sticky note attached to Clint’s door.

_‘Out saving the world – or maybe just part of New York. Whatever, I’m out shooting stuff for the greater good right now, leave a message if it’s so damn important.’_

Ugh.

…

            “What the fuck?!” Tony’s yelp interrupted an important moment in ‘ _Streets of Fire’_ and Natasha and Kate both swiveled around to glare at him.

            “Hush,” Natasha said firmly and then, as if that were that, turned back around and rewound the movie to the beginning of the scene.

            “Yeah,” Kate concurred, narrowing her eyes meaningfully at Tony Stark (Tony Stark!) and…that other guy (oh, Bruce Banner, Phil had files on him… ohmigod, she’d just shushed the Hulk).

            But the Hulk (maybe? He wasn’t looking all that green or rage-filled at the moment…) surprised her by smiling slightly, “I remember this movie, _‘Streets of Fire,’_ right?” he turned to Tony, “It has a sledgehammer fight in the end.”

            “Yes,” Natasha confirmed, tone clearly tacking on an extra ‘now please shut up and watch’ to the end of the sentence.

            Kate, sure Natasha would sort out the intruders, stuffed another handful of delicious, artificially flavored popcorn in her mouth. Matt would have had fits if she’d made this in the apartment.

            Well, maybe not _fits,_ but he’d definitely get that ‘my nose has been traumatized, oh the chemicals’ face.

            “What the hell are you doing here?” Tony’s voice dropped a decibel when Natasha glowered at him again, but he did not stop talking, “And who the hell is _that_?”

            “I’m Hawkeye. Now shut up,” Kate said authoritatively.

            “Um, Clint? Got something you wanna share with the class?” Tony said doubtfully.

            Kate rolled her eyes, “Ew, do I look like a thirty-something year old man?”

            Tony shrugged, “Aliens happened. Intense drag could be a thing.”

            Natasha huffed in exasperation and paused the DVD with a gesture that suggested she would much prefer jabbing the remote into Tony’s windpipe.

            Kate rolled her eyes, if anything, even harder. “My name’s Kate, doofus. I’m the _other_ Hawkeye.”

            “There’s _two_ ,” Bruce said in the voice of a man who has just solved a very important puzzle in his head, “That’s what the note meant.”

            “I’m still stuck on the fact that a teeny-bopper just called me ‘doofus’,” Tony said, “What is this, the early 2000s?” He paused, the gears in his head turning, “So wait…you know who shwarma guy is?”

            Kate looked at Natasha, who had murder in her eyes. “Um, Nat? Who’s shwarma guy?”

            “You are investigating him?” Natasha growled.

            Tony’s eyebrows climbed towards his hairline, “Yeah? Is this a problem?”

            “Yes,” Natasha’s words were becoming tight and clipped and Kate _really_ hoped she wasn’t going to have to mediate a fight between her foster-mom and _Iron Man_.

            The pieces suddenly came together in Kate’s head and she choked on the inappropriate urge to giggle, “Wait, no, they’re not investigating…?” she shot Natasha a significant look. Natasha’s look back at her was nothing but resigned patience.

            “It would appear so.”

            Kate couldn’t help it, a few rogue laughs escaped, “Oh, that’s bad, isn’t it? Like, really bad. But kind of funny, right?”  

            Natasha’s face spoke volumes. Unfortunately, those volumes were in another language and so heavily footnoted they became near-indecipherable. Kate played it safe and just smiled guilessly at her.

            Natasha, because she has a noticeable soft spot for Hawkeyes (and Daredevils) allowed her face to relax a fraction. This did not stop her from turning to the two men and saying, in a tone of quiet authority, “The man you are investigating? Stop.”

            “Why?” Tony began to demand, but Bruce kicked him in the shin and somehow that managed to shut him up. For about a second. And then he was clumsily changing the subject because that second was so heavy with tension he apparently couldn’t take it any longer, “So what movie are we watching?”

            “ _Streets of Fire,_ ” Kate answered, because she was feeling generous and it was pretty funny that the Avengers were snooping around Mr.-Secret-Identity-I-want-to-have-my-superhero-cake-and-eat-it-too’s non-mask life. Yeah. She’d heard about Matt’s stunt with the shwarma place post-battle. She’d also heard from Foggy that it had almost gotten Matt fired and only some _very_ fast talking managed to save his job. She almost thought that maybe they shouldn’t have bothered. They all knew Matt hated working for L&Z anyway. But that was a problem for another day. “Also, aren’t you supposed to be some kind of genius?” she asked Tony, “You already heard the movie name like a minute ago.”

            “Yeah, but now I’m angling for an invitation to join you guys so I don’t seem like a dick just flopping on the couch and watching anyway for the next hour.” Tony shrugged, apparently at ease with this reasoning.

            Natasha did not roll her eyes, but she gave a very good impression of the expression without having to noticeably twitch a muscle. “Sit.” She shot a look at Bruce, “You too.”

            When the men were both (tentatively) seated, Natasha gave them a final look-over for good measure and said “Any further commentary before I press play?”

            “Uh, do you know where Hawkeye – Clint-Hawkeye, I mean, is? He left a note…” Bruce said. He had restless hands, Kate thought, they seemed to be constantly fiddling, tucked in close and shifting.

            Natasha gave an elegant shrug, “Sometimes he goes out to fight street-criminals with Daredevil. Sometimes he’s just wandering.”

            It had been especially bad post-New York, Kate knew. But if Natasha was back to looking unconcerned about Clint’s midnight jaunts, then things must be returning to whatever counted as normal with them.

            “Now, if you are finished being nosy,” Natasha said – which was a bit rich coming from a spy – “I am going to press play and you are all going to be silent.”

            The men both nodded, shifting around until they were more comfortable where they sat. Kate allowed herself to tip over slightly until she was leaning against Natasha, her surrogate mother warm beside her. On-screen more characters wearing terrifyingly 80s clothing tromped around trying to look intimidating. Kate grinned; wait until Foggy and Matt heard she’d watched old 80s action movies with Natasha, Iron Man, and the Hulk.

…

            “You see Clint out there?” Foggy asked as Matt put away the ice pack Kate had graciously provided him for the night.

            “No, Foggy, not even a little bit,” Matt deadpanned. Loki had gone to bed and Matt supposed to normal people the silence was heavy and secure.

            “You know what I mean.”

            Matt sighed; he did, of course he did, “Yeah, I heard him a few times, but he never got into anything he couldn’t handle – and I think he wants to be alone sometimes. Just alone with his own head. I think it’s important.”

            Foggy snorted, “You, on the other hand, have the opposite problem.”

            “Huh?”

            “You spend _too much_ time in your head.”

…

            The weeks seemed to just sort of –melt away after that. Slipping into comfortable patterns as they passed. Normal, for a given value of normal.

            Loki was probably the worst roommate on this planet or another one, but he oddly seemed to be…improving. It helped that Kate had taken to smacking him with one of the couch’s throw pillows whenever he said, did or otherwise _was_ something insensitive.

            Matt’s hatred of his day job grew to new, heretofore-unreached heights. Foggy just sort of bore it all with weary tolerance. Matt vented his feelings on the heads of New York’s criminal element. He and Kate continued to merrily break into Avenger’s Tower with impunity.

            Kate had mentioned the shwarma-guy investigation to him after her night watching 80s B-movies with Natasha and the science bros.

            “Matt, they’re _investigating_ you. And they might stop now when Natasha’s still pissed about it, but this is Tony Stark. You tell him not to touch something and it’s like flashing a bright neon sign in his face saying ‘TOUCH EVERYTHING’. He’s going to figure out who you are. And it’s going to be the worst possible timing because that’s what happens to superheroes.”

            “We’re vigilantes.”

            “Don’t pull out the semantics argument with me, I get you’re a fancy lawyer and I’ll lose, but I’ll still be right and you can’t get away from that.”

            “That makes no sense.”

            “I’m still right.”

            “Kate.”

            “Matt. Just, remember, secrets tend to blow up when you don’t want them to. If I were you, I’d clear all this up with them soon, when you’re still marginally in control of the situation.”

            Matt had sighed, “When did you get so smart?”

            Kate snorted, “I’ve always been this smart. You just haven’t noticed until now.”

            Finally, and with some argument-help from Foggy, they managed to convince Matt to, at the very least, make a daytime appearance at Avenger’s Tower, in street clothes.

            “Mother’s Day, I’ll do it Mother’s Day,” Matt finally conceded, looking very put-upon.

            “You can’t wait a whole extra year for this!” Foggy said, exasperated, “Mother’s Day was back in May!”

            Kate sighed, “Not this Mother’s Day. Matt and Nat always do something special in the summer for what they _call_ Mother’s Day.”

            “It’s actually the day I met Natasha,” Matt said quietly, “When I crashed into the hotdog cart.”

            “Oh,” Foggy said softly, “Yeah, I’m sorry buddy, I forgot.”

            Matt shrugged, a small smile ticking up the corners of his mouth, “It’s fine – ” he began to say when Loki interrupted the moment, as he was wont to do.

            “If you three are done being sentimental, the mention of hotdogs has made me hungry. Shall we adjourn to the street corner for sustenance?”

            And so they did. Matt made faces the whole time and had to be silenced by Kate or Foggy whenever he seemed about to list off all of the wildly disturbing things he could smell and taste, but somehow it was still a good day.

…

            “Have a good Mother’s Day with Nat?”

            “Yeah, we got gelato.”

            “Introduce yourself to any Avengers?”

            “I spoke to Ms. Potts.”

            “Okay, buddy, that’s a start…”

            “I know, Foggy, I know. I’ll talk to them all tomorrow.”

…

            ‘Tomorrow’ aliens attacked California.

…

            Kate rushed into the living room, furiously texting, taking a break long enough to jerk her head up in the direction of the kitchen, where Matt, Foggy, and Loki were squabbling over breakfast and say, “Guys, turn on the news.”

            Foggy jumped to comply and they were suddenly assaulted by the voice of an unnerved newscaster saying humanoids of suspected alien origin were wreaking havoc in Los Angeles. She went on to compare the attack to the Chitauri Incident and some sort of crisis in a small New Mexico town a year or so ago that Matt and Kate knew for a fact Phil had a hand in hushing up.

            “Holy, shit, Kate, that’s your _school_ ,” Foggy said, pointing at the screen.

            “What’s going on?” Matt snapped, a muscle ticking in his jaw.

            Foggy began to narrate the action on the shaky news footage, but was interrupted by Loki’s voice, suddenly very cold, saying, “They have escaped,” and then devolving into a string of what sounded very much like Asgardian profanity.

            “No shit, Sherlock,” Kate snapped, fingers flying over her phone, “I’ve got to call Nico, find out what’s going on,” she muttered.

            “Who’s Nico?” Matt asked as Foggy rounded on Loki and demanded to know who escaped and what was going on.

            “Friend from college,” Kate explained, “Well, not really college, just LA, she and her crew work at a club and save the city periodically. They’re all like, 20,” she paused, sucking in a breath, “Except Molly, she’s like 12. Goddammit, someone respond!”

            “When I affected my escape from Odin’s prison I assumed none would be able to follow me, but it appears some of the cleverer inmates have found my path out,” Loki said, voice coldly furious.

            “So wait, we’re getting attacked by an unknown number of alien criminals?” Foggy demanded, “How bad are we talking?”

            “Very, very bad,” Loki informed him tersely, “And they all, to a man, have some form of vendetta against my brother or I.”

            “ _What_.”

            Loki was nodding to himself, “They must have mis-landed. They were most likely aiming for this city and missed. Or perhaps they are attempting to draw him out…”

            _“The Avengers are reported to be on-site as well as a number of what appear to be super-powered teenagers_ ,” the newscaster reported from the television.

            “Kate, I believe your friends are now famous,” Matt said dryly.

            Kate rounded on the tv with a curse, “Yeah, that’s Nico and Chase. Oh, look, Gert’s brought Old Lace.”

            “Your friends have a pet _dinosaur_?” Foggy said, momentarily side-tracked.

            “Uh, yeah, kind of? She’s got a psychic link to Gert. The girl with the purple hair,” she clarified, “And Nico’s got this magic staff and Chase…kind of just presses buttons on gadgets until they do cool stuff,” she sighed, “I really hope Xavin and Karolina stay out of this one, they actually _are_ aliens. Nice ones, just, you know, _aliens._ The country’s pretty anti-alien right now…”

            “Your friends are pretty awesome.”

            “Yeah, let’s just hope they don’t get arrested by Captain America for superheroing without a permit. Because I’m pretty sure Tony would take Victor apart just to see how he works.”

            “Victor?”

            “Cyborg. Long story.”

            “Right.”

            “Let’s refocus, shall we?” Matt snapped, “What are the Avengers doing?”

            “While a few stragglers are tussling with the children, the main force appears focused on the Avengers,” Loki summarized tersely, “They do not appear to be coming off well in this confrontation.”

            A tight, strained sound of frustration escaped from between Matt’s teeth. “Kate, we need to help them.”

            _“What_?” the sound that burst from Loki was only just this side of hysteria, “You two? You are soft humans, what could you possibly do to assist in a battle against Asgardian war criminals?”

            Matt clenched his jaw in that heroic way he did before going of too pummel criminals in the dark of the night…or going to confession, to explain to his priest _why_ he pummeled criminals in the dark of the night. “That’s our family.”

            Kate worried her lip between her teeth, “I’m with Matt.”

            “What is _wrong_ with you?” Loki demanded incredulously, “You will die if you face them.”

            Matt fixed him with his blank, soul-searing stare, “Then so be it.”

            “ _Matt_ ,” Foggy snapped, “No dying, you or anyone else.”

            The shrill cry of Kate’s phone didn’t so much break the tension as defer it for another time. “Yes, hello, what? …Yeah, I saw the news. It doesn’t look good… Yeah, my brother and I are going to try to get out there… What, no, you guys don’t need to… Fine, I’ll let you know when we’ve got a SHIELD plane.” She hung up. “Guys, we’re stealing a plane. Oh, and my friends Billy and Teddy are gonna help us out.”

            Matt nodded tightly and went back to staring down Loki, “You’re coming too.”

            “What?” the godling demanded.

            “Thor’s your brother and he’s on every single one of those escapees’ hit lists. You’re coming.”

            Loki’s face twisted, flickering through a hundred emotions before finally settling on a resignation. “Very well.”

            “Foggy –” Matt turned to him, and it was his face’s turn to spin through a dozen emotions before settling on blankness. He really was Natasha’s son, Kate thought absently. “Take care of the cactus while we’re out.”

            Foggy rolled his eyes, “That’s the best you could do, buddy?” At Matt’s distressed look Foggy laughed, “How about an awkward bro-hug and a nice ‘see you when I get back from having the shit kicked out of me by aliens’?”

            Matt grinned, “Sure, that works.”

…

            Phil was not exactly enthused by the idea of Matt, Kate, and Kate’s friends (who apparently had pretty spectacular powers of their own – what kind of college was Kate _going_ to?) hitching a ride on a SHIELD helicopter to go out to California to fight aliens.

            Phil was in the midst of pointing out he was on medical leave, they weren’t trained pilots and this whole thing was stupidly dangerous, when Loki appeared beside Matt. “Phillip Coulson.”

            Phil’s face shut down so face someone might as well have thrown a switch. “You come any closer and I’ll shoot you again.”

            “Of course,” Loki nodded, “I…it has been made clear to me in recent weeks that my…actions towards yourself, Agent Barton, and this ridiculous planet were…inappropriate. I…am sorry.”

            Phil stared at him incredulously.

            Loki huffed impatiently, “And now a horde of Asgardian war criminals set upon destroying my brother are rampaging through Los Angeles. I cannot allow this. Now, please assist these people in flying to this planet’s absurd protectors’ aid.”

            Phil grit his teeth and glowered at Matt, who was looking like he wanted nothing more than for the ground to open up beneath his feet and swallow him whole – and Kate, who was grinning awkwardly. Billy was holding back a laugh and Teddy had sympathetic awkwardness written all over his face.

            “Very well,” Phil conceded, and then said with a smile both bland and terrifying, “But rest assured, Loki, that one wrong move and I will shoot you again.”

            “Noted.”

            “Come on, then, gang, let’s go rescue some superheroes,” Kate said with false enthusiasm.

…

            Los Angeles was chaos. They got down on the ground and it was nothing but smoke and dust and debris. Matt’s senses, already raw and aching from the flight screamed at the sudden onslaught of sound, smell, and just…everything. He shook his head, heat-sense blurring and twisting until it finally resettled into something manageable. Off to his right, Kate was yelling to someone else, someone she called ‘America’ but whose heartbeat was too quick, and footsteps too light to be the Captain.

            “America! I didn’t realize you were still in town,” Kate was shouting.

            “Yeah, I stuck around for summer school, totally regretting it.” A girl’s voice echoed back, “I see you brought back-up.”

            “Hey America!” Teddy yelled to her.

            “Hey! Who else is with you?”

            “Just me, and Billy. Oh, and Kate’s brother.”

            “He’s super hot!” Billy added.

            “Not the time, Billy.” Kate growled.

            “Never the time, Billy” Teddy added, sounding amused.

            “Sorry, babe,” Billy was grinning tightly around the words and Matt got the feeling his and Teddy’s banter was the couple’s way of keeping themselves grounded in the middle of what probably looked like the blitz.

            “Hawkeye?” Matt tipped his head towards his sister.

            “Yeah, Daredevil?”

            “Let’s go fight some aliens.”

            “We’re all going to die,” Loki muttered under his breath, but quiet enough that Matt was the only one who heard it.

…

            Matt had to hand it to Kate’s friends, he thought as he twisted out of the way of a convict’s wild strike with what sounded like a sword (the metal hummed slightly as it moved through the air the way all steel did, deep down); they were pretty good for kids. Then again, he ruminated as he landed a _very precise_ kick against the flat of the blade, sending it flying back to slam into the Asgardian’s face, (the scent of what must be Asgardian blood flared hot and bright in his senses as the man’s nose snapped with a tiny crack), they’d have to be. All super-powered with the exception of Kate, their special abilities probably drove them to harnessing their strengths for some purpose. And, he knew from experience (his opponent staggered and tried to bring the sword back down in a chopping motion, Matt jumped up and out of the way at the last second, letting the sword go crashing into the pavement) super-powers lent themselves very well to combat. (He twisted, ensuring he landed on his opponent’s clasped hands, still locked around the stuck blade, and sprang up to deliver two swift strikes to the already gushing nose, and a solid kick to the face. Something cracked under his boot and the devil inside grinned a bloody grin.)

            In the back of his mind, where the scared little boy he had been dwelled beside the snarling devil, he turned over thoughts of Natasha and Clint. Were they safe? (He landed on the ground; his enemy had finally managed to pull the sword free but was reeling on the spot.) Were they still alive? (Matt duck and wove around the sword, dancing with it, feeling every lesson Natasha ever taught him running through his muscles, through his veins, through his blood and bone.) He tried to search for them in the melee but the fight at hand overwhelmed his senses. (Matt jumped again, spring-boarding off of a wall or chunk of rubble and landing on the enemy’s shoulders like a child sitting on their father’s shoulders to see a parade – but unlike a child Matt twisted, letting his momentum swing him down and around as he clenched his knees tighter and tighter around his enemy’s neck.) He couldn’t let himself worry about his parents right now – there was too much work left to do.

            (He jerked his knees around and down, taking his enemy to the ground and flipping out and away before he could be flattened. Natasha taught him that trick.)

…

            Kate found Clint. “How many have you shot, Hawkeye?”

            “52.”

            “How many stayed down?”

            “Less than 52.”

            “Let’s fix that.”

            “Sounds like a plan. Hawkeye.”

…

            Loki was right about all the escapees converging on Thor. He blasted one away from his brother with a vicious twist of his fingers an a bright flare of magic, making sure to smile nastily when Thor turned towards him instead of letting any of the relief curdling in his gut show on his face.

            “If you have come to taunt me brother, now is not the time,” Thor said reprovingly.

            “Now who’s to say I’m not one of these desperate hopefuls panting for a chance to kill you?”

            “Brother.”

            “Thor.”

            “Loki, why – ” Thor began, but Loki cut him off with an impatient flick of his wrist.

            “My reasoning is my own, brother. But know I will fight by your side today.”

            “A temporary truce?”

            “Hmm,” Loki turned away and drew his sword, sending it spinning in the tidy, whirling arcs his mother had taught him, his grip light on the hilt, his feet firm, stance easy.

            Thor shook his head, apparently content not to trouble himself with Loki’s mysteries, and turned back to bash away at their foes with his hammer. “Brother?” he asked over his shoulder a few moments later.

            “Don’t wear it out,” Loki said coolly, but didn’t refute the implication. He’d claimed Thor as his brother again. The big lout probably thought that was some sort of _progress._

            Loki sighed and slashed at another one of his erstwhile cellmates. This business of having a family was far more complicated than Matt and Kate implied.

…

            People called Natasha a cold fish.

            (snap, crack – bone breaking, not hers, Asgardians were strong, but everyone had a weakness)

            And maybe she was. After all, she’d had to learn how to feel the nicer emotions, the softer ones, later in life. After it was too late to learn them all the way. When she’d had to choose between feeling things like a real girl and showing those feelings on her face.

            (crunch, pop – joints were easy, everyone does more damage to their joints than they think, just let them break themselves on you, break themselves for you, it’s easy)

            In the Red Room everything felt very grey. Because there wasn’t much to feel. Options were limited, and blind terror stops being terrifying after too long. The adrenaline burns out everything else like a brushfire tearing through a forest – scorching it from the inside.

            (click, creak – one turn too many and the enemy’s knee was toast, overstrained, overworked. He fell. She stayed standing, such was the way of the world.)

            Natasha understood Matt and his devil, far more than he could ever know. But her devil wasn’t full of rage; it was the cold, the cold of Siberia, the cold of menacing calculations that turned human lives into numbers, into negative numbers. There was no joy in fighting the enemy for Natasha; there was only the pride in a job well done, the satisfaction of another day at the office fulfilled. The joy was in coming home. In watching the ripple effects of her actions from a place where she was warm and safe and loved. In watching something she did, this knife-blade of a woman, protect people, places, planets.

            (thud, crack – let the bodies hit the floor, the Black Widow is hunting)

…

            The battle wound down after an immeasurable length of time. Time Matt spent as a human missile. Search and destroy. In the aftermath – the invading Asgardians all accounted for and restrained, the battered Avengers gathered by some unspoken agreement (or maybe they were all drawn to the mighty blast of lighting from Thor’s hammer like ships to a lighthouse signal – Matt himself tracked the scent of ozone in the air and Kate whispering “It’s over”). A few streets over Matt could hear Kate bidding her Californian friends farewell (after checking each other over for injuries) before beginning to trudge over to the Avengers with Billy and Teddy in tow.

            Matt staggered into the open space left over from Thor’s final fight just in time to catch (and god, his ears were stilling ringing like church bells and he might be listing just a bit to the right) Captain America shouting “Everyone here?”

            “Cap, you can _see_ us, you know if we’re here,” Tony griped, “Even fucking _Daredevil_ is here, and yes, I have so many, many questions about that.”

            “Not funny, Tony,” Clint rasped from where he was…sitting? It sounded like he was seated somewhere, his voice coming from a slightly different direction than usual.

            “Who said I was trying to be funny?” Tony sounded strained – exhausted. “There is a man in a devil suit right over there.”

            Now would probably be a good time to stop skulking behind the debris and hoping the Avengers will let his presence go. “Hey, Clint.”

            “Mother of – HOLY SHIT, KID, YOU ARE IN SO MUCH GODDAMNED TROUBLE!” Clint went to stand up – his ribs ground together with a sickening creak – and he sat back down again. “Amendment: when I can stand, you are in so much goddamned trouble.”

            Matt chuckled, even though his throat felt raw and bleeding from all the dust in the air. “I’m fine, Clint.”

            “You’re limping. And bleeding.” Clint groaned, “Nat’s gonna kill me.”

            Matt laughed and finished limping (yes, he was limping and about 50% sure his ankle was some kind of fractured and only structurally sound at the moment because of his boots) over to Clint and collapsed onto the chunk of rubble beside him. “I’ll protect you from Mom,” he yawned, exhaustion sweeping over him, a sudden and implacable wave.

            “You’d better, kid,” Clint grumbled.

            Tony spluttered, “Did he just say what I think he just said?”

            “What are you doing here?” Natasha, suddenly standing behind them – Matt’s senses were drifting in and out of focus, it was dizzying and strange but he was too tired to fight it, asked, cool tone a warning.

            Matt yawned again, “Came to help out. Kate’s here too.”

            Clint snorted, “Should have known you’d be here with her.”

            Matt huffed, too tired to be really miffed, “I’m a _good_ big brother. I don’t let her superhero without backup.”

            “That was irresponsible, Polygraph,” Natasha said, voice hard, “You could have died. This isn’t cleaning up Hell’s Kitchen, this is aliens and you are human and you could have _died._ ”

            Matt’s jaw tightened incrementally, “So could you.”

            “You are my _son_.”

            “And you’re my mother,” he snapped back, anger at her double standard giving him fresh energy.

            “ _It is not acceptable for you to die before me_ ,” Natasha practically hissed between her teeth, voice even but strained, as if fighting for control and losing.

            And Matt…had no words. “Mom –” he began, but broke off, helpless.

            “Kid,” Clint said, “Tasha, we’re a family. We do stupid shit for each other. That’s kind of what love is. Doing stupid shit for each other and coming home together at the end of the day. So. We’ve done the stupid shit part, now let’s wait for our SHIELD-appointed ride so we can go home.” He reached for Natasha around Matt and she took his hand and let him pull her down until she was seated between them.

            “What the actual – ” a confused and frustrated Tony began to say when he was interrupted by the appearance of Thor…and Loki.

            The brothers – who were deep in quiet conversation in whatever their native language actually was, broke off when confronted by their comrades. Loki, who had been nodding absently along with whatever his brother had been saying, turned unexpectedly to Clint – who, very expectedly, tensed up and reached for a weapon, as did Natasha.

            Loki held up a hand, “I come not to attack, but to thank.”

            “You’re welcome,” Matt said wryly, “You owe me $500 worth of food. Minimum.”

            “Not you,” Loki said testily, “Your adoptive father. I could not but overhear your description of family. Thank you. Your words and the past weeks observing your son and daughter and their companion with the absurd name – ”

            “I’ll tell Foggy you said that,” Matt muttered.

            “ – have enlightened me. I am more at peace now than I have been a very long time. And for that I thank you.”

            Matt was pretty sure Clint was gaping at the demi-god. It was Natasha who replied, voice dry but not insincere, “You are welcome. But mind-control, murder, or cause mass-destruction on our planet again and there will be nowhere safe for you to hide. We will find you. And destroy you.”

            “You speak with great confidence.”

            “I know.”

            Matt couldn’t be sure, but he thought Loki might have smiled at that. Matt’s possibly-erstwhile guest turned to him, “I will be returning to New York to retrieve my possessions and then I will depart. I am no longer welcome on Asgard, but there is much of the universe left to see. Perhaps we shall see each other again, perhaps not.”

            Matt couldn’t help smiling a little, “One, I’m too tired to make my usual blind joke about seeing, just assume it was made and Kate hit your with a pillow for being insensitive. Again. Two, goodbye, Loki. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

            Loki nodded tightly and turned away.

            “Oh, and three,” Matt called after him, “Say goodbye to Kate. She thinks you’re friends now or something.”

            Loki sniffed. “Or something.” But there was smile in his voice.

            A lull as everyone present stared at Matt and/or the spot Loki just vanished from.

            And then everyone started talking at once.

…

            Matt ended up explaining everything on the flight back to New York (piloted by Phil). Kate, a little sniffly, either from having to say goodbye to her battered friends – with the exception of Billy and Teddy, who had both passed out as soon as they hit seats – or from bidding Loki farewell, sat beside Matt as he fielded a dozen questions at once.

            “Okay, who the hell are you?” Tony demanded just as Clint yelped “Loki? _Loki_?” while Thor earnestly told him “You have done my brother and I a great service, you have my gratitude,” and Captain America said “Okay, start from the beginning,” and Bruce snored serenely while Natasha stared at Matt like she could drag answers out of his brain with enough effort.

            Matt had finally had enough and snapped, “QUIET,” because the cacophony was getting overwhelming.

            He sucked in a deep breath and tried to find the center of calm he relied on in the courtroom before delivering a killer closing argument. “My name is Matt, I’m Daredevil. I was in an accident when I was nine that took my sight but gave him highly enhanced senses. I can hear heartbeats; I can build an accurate mental picture based on heat distribution, air currents and echo. Natasha adopted me when I was ten. We tricked Clint into joining our family when I was in middle school. He married Natasha when I was in high school.”

            “Told you something was there, Cap owes me a dollar,” Tony said quietly.

            Clint just snorted and said, “More like I tricked them into accepting me into their tribe.”

            Matt cleared his throat pointedly; he was trying to just stick to the facts here. “Natasha taught me how to fight to help me focus my mind and my senses. I started fighting crime when I was in college. Kate is my adoptive sister. I found her in a dumpster when she was 16.”

            “Yeah, because that doesn’t sound sketchy as hell,” Kate’s eyeroll was practically verbal, “Okay, guys, time for story time with Hawkeye. Daredevil’s boring,” she ignored the indignant sound Matt made and plowed ahead, “My name’s Kate; I ran away from home to go shoot criminals with a bow and arrow when I was a teenager.”

            “You still are a teenager,” Matt muttered and Kate kicked him in retaliation.

            “Okay, so I ran away a few years ago. With a bow and arrows. To shoot criminals. But not, like, fatally. Just enough to get them caught. And I bit off more than I could chew one night and Daredevil found me all beaten up in a dumpster and he and his roommate took me in and patched me up. And Matt kind of adopted me. And then I met his crazy parents and they kind of informally adopted me.

            “So that’s us. But the Loki’s thing’s different. Apparently Loki showed up at Matt’s apartment demanding to know how functional families work? Because he saw some stuff in Clint’s head about us and was really lost and confused and thought Matt could help. So Matt’s kind of been foster-parenting Loki. Or something. And he’s not that terrible a guy once you get through all the issues. Oh, hey, I meant Loki, but that totally applies to Matt too – hey, don’t kick me, Matty, rude.”

            “Why didn’t you tell us?” Natasha asked, “About Loki?”

            “He didn’t want his brother to know,” Matt explained, “And I was able to subdue him easily the first day, when he broke in, so I was not concerned with the threat he might pose. And he was telling the truth when he said he wanted to understand.”

            Clint swore under his breath – a string of punchy expletives in as many foreign languages as possible, “I can’t believe it.”

            “My brother wished to understand?” Thor said gently.

            “Yes,” Matt confirmed.

            “And that led to our reconciliation today?”

            “Yes.”

            “Then I thank you again. You have given us both a great gift.”

            “I’m still hung up on you being her kid,” Tony said, then paused and mouthed the word ‘mom’, the ghost of the sound only audible to Matt’s ears, “You’re shwarma guy!” he said accusingly.

            Matt nodded, grinning, “You’re a very smart man, Mr. Stark, but you tend to skip the obvious and head straight for the improbable.”

            Tony groaned, “Ugh, I can’t believe – ugh. This is embarrassing.”

            “For you,” Matt was still grinning.

            “You are _so_ her kid!   Gah, I can’t believe it.”

            “You’ve already said that.”

            “I bet you’re a lawyer too. You talk like a lawyer.”

            Matt just grinned some more.

            Tony made an exasperated noise and flung his hands in the air, “Of course, the one thing I get right.”

            A creak of leather and Kevlar and a hand suddenly flared hot and bright in Matt’s heat-sense, “Hello, Matt,” said Captain America, wryly, “A pleasure to meet you. Please excuse Tony, he’s a little over-tired. Needed a nap a few hours ago.”

            Matt fought very hard to keep a straight face as he shook Captain America (Captain America!)’s hand. Wait until he told Foggy. “Like a toddler?”

            Cap nodded in confirmation, “Like a toddler,” he released Matt’s hand and shook Kate’s, “A pleasure to meet you as well, Kate.”

            “Captain America is a rude troll, everybody, I’ll just have it be known, that Captain America is a rude troll,” Tony protested in the background, but it sounded like he was laughing too.

…

            “Let me get this straight – you and Kate have a standing dinner invitation to have _Sunday Family Dinner_ with the _Avengers and Dr. Jane Foster_.”

            “And Pepper Potts.”

            "How do you get all the cool friends?  You'd be a social hermit if I let you!"  

            “You could probably join us if you promise not to be weird.”

            Foggy made a sound that could have been a very overwhelmed and exasperated ‘yes’.

            “Although,” Matt mused, “I’m pretty sure the dinner invite is only valid if Kate and I survive the next week.”

            “What.”

            Matt winced, “Mom and Clint aren’t too pleased we kept the Loki thing from them. Kate and I are training with them until further notice. We might not make it.”

            Foggy cackled, “Serves you right.”

            “Oh, and you’re taking self-defense with my Mom. She’s both upset with you and concerned for your safety. New York’s a dangerous place.” Matt managed to say all of that with a straight face.

            He totally deserved getting smacked in the head repeatedly with a couch pillow.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Next up in this series I'll be working on a short Clint-centric piece for Father's Day. 
> 
> Fic title is from 'Dare You to Move' by Switchfoot


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